Man as a species is a natural being, which develops in the course of world history. Man is primarily a creative being, with desires and powers, faculties, creative abilities, which have their outcome in production. Mankind in its history has transformed the objects of the natural world and has created the entire world of culture. The vast historical and natural accumulation of the material and cultural objects mankind has produced are the manifestations or externalizations or embodiments of man's creative powers. Man actualizes himself in the world. In Marx's own powerful; language:
The whole so-called world history is nothing other than the production of man through human labor [sic]...
Marx firmly believes that the history of the world is the developing process in which human beings have created the great totality of objects in nature and in human culture, and in this process, the human species will find itself objectified and achieve self-realization. So, for example, the whole of modern industry is man's product - industrial mechanization is the externalization of human hands, ears, eyes, brains. Mills, mines, factories and their expanding technologies, have all been produced by human beings and are externalizations of their creative powers. But the n human species does not realize that it is the creator of the world of natural objects and of culture. What man sees when he looks at these objects which he has produced are alien things in "an alien hostile world standing over against him." This is so because man's productive activity is done in servitude to the God money, rather than in spontaneous self-determination. The result has been that the history of human creative production has been a history of man's alienation from his own productive nature.
.:. Alienation
Human alienation takes four main form, according to Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts: Man is alienated from the product of his own work, from the act of producing, from his own social nature, and from his fellow men. First, the worker in industrialized capitalism is alienated from his product, which "exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him...the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien." His product is not his own but is utilized by strangers as their private property. And the more the worker produces, the less is his productivity valued. "The worker becomes an even cheaper commodity, the more cheap commodity he creates." The worker's wages are just sufficient to maintain him with what is necessary to keep him working. Second, the capitalist system alienates man from his productive activity. His activity is not determined by his personal interest or his creativity, but is something which he is compelled to do in order to remain alive. "His labor [sic]...is forced labor [sic]." As a result, in Marx's words, "The worker only feels himself outside his work, and in his work he feels outside himself." The more he works the less human he becomes. He finally feels at home only in the animalian functions of eating, drinking, and sexuality.
Third, capitalist society alienates the worker from the essential qualities of the human species. Unlike animals, says Marx, who produce only for their immediate needs, human produce knowledge and culture (such as art, science, technology) for the whole human race. Humans produce as universal beings for universal ends. But the capitalist system degrades man's urge to produce for all mankind into animal labour, into a mere means to satisfy his personal physical needs. The fourth form of alienation is the "estrangement of man from man." His fellow man is a stranger competing with him as a worker and for the products of their labour. Moreover, both are estranged from "man's essential nature."
.:. Capitalist System and Exploitation
Capitalism: Definition: What is capitalism? A capitalist mode of production is one in which a few humans own and control the major forces or means of production as their private property and they employ as workers those who have nothing to sell but their own labor power.
Labour theory of value: The commodities that the workers produce have a value equivalent to the amount of labour needed to produce them.
Surplus value: Directly related to Marx's theory of value is his crucial concept of surplus value. This is the concept which explains both the profit of the capitalist and the exploitation of the worker. Marx defines surplus value as the differences between the value of the wages received by the worker and the value of what he has produced. That difference, the difference between what the capitalist must pay the worker as wages and what the capitalist can sell the worker's product for, makes up the capitalist's profit.
Exploitation: The working class is forced into the position of selling on the market its labour power for the going rate of wages; the capitalist exploits the worker by selling the goods the worker produces form more money than he pays to the workers in wages. Capitalism is a system of exploitation, Marx argues, in which capitalists profiteer by paying the workers only the existing rate of wages in place of the full market value of the products the workers produce.
Historical materialism is the central theory in Marx's later writings. Materialism is the name conventionally given in philosophy to any metaphysical theory which claims that theory is material.
Marx believed that his materialism is different from all previous types of materialism (such as mechanistic materialism of Rene Descartes) in its awareness that the reality of material objects is not independent of human beings, but is actually a reality that has been transformed by human labour in the course of history. Marx presents his own conception of historical materialism, as a radically new materialism and as a new way of understanding history.
Society: Economic Base
Marx's historical materialism explains the whole sweep of history by taking man's material production as the base of history and by viewing mental production, man's intellectual and cultural life, as its effect. Marx insists that "in the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of history" in material production has never before been understood.
The first historical act is thus the production of means to satisfy these needs ['eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other things'], the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, - which today, as thousand of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled in order to sustain human .life.
What does Marx mean by his view that material production is the real basis of history and that human thought and culture are only its effect? Like Hegel before him, Marx is trying to find a key which will explain the characteristics of individual human societies and also the changes which have taken place in human societies in the course of history. First, with respect to explaining the characteristics of individual human societies, … Marx [points out that] every individual society is an interrelated organic totality, in which no part can be understood in isolation. But for the idealistic philosopher, Hegel, the explanation of the organic unity of a particular society lies in the spirit of the people, which embodies the spirit of the Absolute. In opposition to Hegel's idealism, for Marx's materialism the explanation of the organic unity of a particular society lies in its material economic foundation.
The concept of the economic structure, or economic foundation, of society is crucial to Marx's view of society and history. Marx begins with a fundamental point about the history of human production. Whereas animals satisfy their needs with what nature provides, human beings must themselves produce the foods and clothing and shelter, which will meet basic human needs. Thus, human must produce the means to change what nature provides into things suitable for human needs. And as soon as man's basic needs are satisfied he develops new needs, which he is also increasingly able to satisfy by his productive activity.
Marx's point is that man is thus the producer of his own expanding material life. Man the producer is limitless in the needs he has the power to create and in the instruments he can produce to satisfy those needs. Human nature is expressed in this ongoing productive activity and its creative power, by which man continually transforms the material world and transforms himself.
In Marx's analysis, this process of man's material production consists of three components or factors. Human production is linked, first of all, to the existing conditions of production in the particular society. By the terms conditions of productions Marx means such basic conditions affecting human production as the existing climate, the geography of the society's physical location, the supply of raw materials, the total population. The second component of production Marx calls the forces of production, and by this term he means the types of skills, tools, instruments, and technology as well as the type and size of the labour supply which are available to the society. The third and crucial component Marx calls the relations of production and by this he means the property relations within a society – specifically, the existing social relations according to which the society organizes its conditions and forces of production and distributes the product among the members of society.
In the process of production, human beings do not only enter into relation with nature. They produce only by working together in a specific manner and by reciprocally exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another, and only within these social connections and relations does their connection with nature, i.e. production, takes place.
The "sum total" of these three components of production in any particular society Marx calls the economic foundation or economic substructure of society and sometimes the mode of production.
Division of labour and Social Classes
The division of labour is a concept which Marx found in his reading of Adam Smith and other economic theorists, for whom it meant that labour becomes specialized in order to perform efficiently the many different skills required in production. But for Marx, the division of labour into specialized jobs has dehumanizing and evil results. It enslaves the worker to a limited and restricting sphere of activity, from which there is no escape. As a result the worker is denied the fulfillment of the totality of his human creative powers, which can never develop under the division of labour. Marx makes this point in a striking way in The German Ideology:
For as soon as labour is distributed, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.
The division of labour chains everyone – labourer, layer, businessman – for life to their respective confining special activities. But the division of labour is responsible for additional evils. It brings into being a slave like state of affairs in which no one any longer controls the means by which he provides for his own subsistence, his own livelihood. Moreover, the relations of production take place of human relations in social life. Individual humans no longer appear to one another as persons but as economic units within the impersonal process of the relations of production in society. Furthermore the division of labour alienates the individual worker from is fellow workers, and sets one against the other, since each is working for increased personal gain and not for a social or human benefit.
Most important, Marx says that "the division of labour implies … the division between capital and labour, and the different forms of property itself." This is the division of labour which occurs in the production process between the producers and the owners of the materials and forces of production. It leads to a situation in which what one man produces, another man appropriates the greater part of as his own private property. Where there is a division of labour between producer and owner, the product of labour no longer belongs to the one who produced it, says Marx, but to the non-productive owner. Thus the division of labour is the source of the institution of private property, and it leads to class division between the class of owners and the class of producers. These two classes are in a master-slave relationship – the class of producers are in the position of slaves to those who own the raw materials and the mills, mines, and factories and are able to appropriate the major share of what the workers produce. Class struggle is the inevitable result of this relationship.
Society: Ideological Superstructure
From his account of the economic foundation, Marx moves on to his explanation of the cultural life of a society. His claim is that the economic foundation of society conditions or determines the entire realm of culture. In a famous passage in the preface to the critique of Political Economy (1850) Marx says:
In the social production of their life, humans enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines then general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.
Here we have the most Marx's most celebrated formulation of his view that human culture is not governed by ideas, by philosophic or older religious beliefs, as it was for Hegel; it is instead a mere superstructure determined by the existing substructure, the economic mode of production. In Marx's famous words concluded the quotation above:
It is not the consciousness of man that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.
All ideas – all human thought in the realms of religion, philosophy, politics, law, and ethics – are conditioned by the economic foundation of society, and specifically by the class division within it. The dominant views in morals, politics, religion, law, philosophy, and art of any society are the ideas of the dominant economic class. Here are Marx’s stinging words from The German Ideology:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control over the means of mental production … The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships …
Marx believes that it must be immediately obvious to anyone that what he has discovered is true – that human mental life is nothing but a superstructure which is determined by the real (economic) basis of society, and that in every society in which there is class conflict, the dominant ideas and values of culture are those which reflect the economic interests of the dominant class. He asks:
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conceptions, in own word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations, and in his social life?
This conception of the cultural superstructure – religion, philosophy, law, political thought, morality, art – as falsifying and distorting the truth about social reality in the interests of a particular social class is the basis of Marx's tremendously influential concept of ideology.
Ideology
For Marx an ideology may be defined as a system of ideas which is determined by class conflict and which reflects and promotes the interests of the dominant class. Ideologies are thus portrayed as distorting types of consciousness, ways of perceiving the human world which falsify the true reality in order to defend and promoted the economic interests of a social class. All of the claims to truth which philosophies, religions, legal systems, political theories, moral systems have made in history are branded by Marx as ideologies; throughout the historical epochs in which there has been a division of labour and class conflict the dominant cultural beliefs have served the dominant class.
Marx exposes the history of human culture as a history of ideology, of persuasive religions, philosophies, and legal systems which have presented themselves as universal and eternal truths for all mankind, while actually representing the ruling class and legitimating its authority and power. So, for example, the political theory of the rising French bourgeoisie called for freedom and equality, which appeared to be for the benefit of mankind, but in fact served primarily to give the bourgeois class the political power which they lacked. So also Christianity called upon the faithful to obey the word of God and to follow the life of Christ as their model; these ideals which appear to serve only spiritual ends in fact served to promote political quietism and passive obedience to all secular rulers, who are seen to be sanctified by God. All the principal ideas and values of history can be shown, according to Marx, to have functioned defensively to protect class interests, and to have functioned deceptively to keep the truth of the exploitative injustices and the dehumanizing aspects of civil society from being recognized by the exploited class.
The Marxian doctrine of ideology soon entered into the mainstream of twentieth-century thought, and produced anew way of looking at any theory by asking the questions "What class interest does the theory represent?" How is it distorting, twisting, misrepresenting reality in order to defend, protect, promote the interests of some identifiable social group? As one contemporary philosopher has said, since Marx developed the concept of ideology, theory has never recovered from this ideological way of looking at it, this suspicion that all philosophizing, all theorizing is less pure, less universal, less detached, less true than it presents itself as being. The Marxian ideological way of looking at theory has pervaded twentieth-century intellectual life and has been extended to all elements of culture – novels, films, magazines, the mass media, social organizations, academia, scholarly and technical publications. All such cultural elements are now commonly regarded as potentially bound to the interests of some identifiable social group. For example, when you are solicited to subscribe to a magazine, do you not immediately wonder what social class viewpoint the magazine represents?
Is there no escape from this ideological trap or "false consciousness"? Marx's reply is that the inexorable laws of history offer the only way to overcome the falsifying ideologies of the ruling class. In the coming, inevitable worldwide revolution waged by the proletariat, the economic foundation of world capitalism and its class conflict will be destroyed, and along with it, the cultural superstructure which it conditioned. As Marx says in the Communist Manifesto: "The Communist revolution is the most radical rapture with traditional property relations: no wonder that its development involves the most radical rapture with traditional ideas."
After the totality of Western culture will have been destroyed as capitalist ideology, the proletariat will by stages move toward a classless society in which ideologies with their defenses and deceptions on behalf of a dominant class will have no function and will disappear.
Theory of Historical Change
Marx's theory of history is constructed on the model which Hegel's philosophy of history provided. History is a meaningful single, developmental process; history is a rational structure which unfolds in time according to the laws of dialectic. But whereas for Hegel the individual units of the dialectical historical process were the great nation-stats, each embodying a stage in the progressing consciousness of freedom, for Marx, in contrast, the individual units of the dialectic of history are the economic modes of production.
Like Hegel, Marx is committed to historicism: He believes that one cannot understand economic modes of production abstractly, but only in terms of their historical situation and historical development. Hegel had accounted for the structure of society and for the dialectical process of historical change by the Cunning of Reason, the agency of the Absolute, which used human passions, the nation-state, and the world historical individuals to change ideas, to bring finite spirits to a full consciousness of their freedom. But Marx angrily rejects Hegel's idealistic theory of historical change as the dialectical development of the idea of freedom. For Marx, ideas can explain nothing; ideas are themselves only the effect of the economic basis of society; ideas are only a superstructure which collapses as soon as the economic foundation of society begins to crack up. For Marx, only economic forces are powerful enough to bring about historical change. How does Marx's materialist dialectic of history explain historical change? Marx explains historical change by a conflict or contradiction which takes place within the triad of the economic foundation of society and shatters it. It is the conflict that develops between the constantly growing forces of production (skills, technology, and inventions) and the existing relations of production, or property relations.
Theory of Revolution
Marx explains this explosive conflict between the constantly developing forces of production and the static relations of production in this way. As man the creative producer works upon nature he transforms production by developing new methods or instruments or technologies of production. In the early stage of a mode of production, the relations of production and their distribution of property aid in the development of these new and improved productive skills and technology. But at a certain point in the latter stages of a mode of production, the growing new forces of production come into conflict with the existing relations of production come into conflict with the existing relations of production and their distribution of property. The interests of the ruling class lead them to resist change and to keep the existing property distribution unchanged, since their dominant position in society depends upon this. The ruling class, which had earlier helped to develop new technologies and forces of production, now fetters them and chains them down from developing further to prevent overproduction and thus to protect their profits and investments.
These relations of production must be "burst asunder" by a revolution to let man's productive forces continue to grow.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution.
Why does a social revolution follow this conflict between the forces and the relations of production? It is the producer class, labour, which suffers, through unemployment, underemployment, loss of new types of work, from the fettering, the chaining of the new forces of production. Acting as a class, the producers break the power of the dominant class by a revolution and they themselves become for a time the new dominant class, seizing political power and generating their own mode of production, which will then determine their own forms of thought.
