Marxism: A Graphic Guide E-Book

Rupert Woodfin

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 126

Beschreibung

Beautiful new edition of a classic comic-book introduction to Marxist thought. Karl Marx was one of the most influential thinkers of the late 19th century, inspiring revolutions and colossal political upheavals that have radically transformed the lives of millions of people and the geopolitical map of the entire world.  But was he a 'Marxist' himself? And how are his ideas still in play in today's society?   Marxism: A Graphic Guide traces the story of Marx's original philosophy, from its roots in 19th-century European thinkers like Hegel, to its influence on modern-day culture. It looks at Marxism's Russian disciples, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, who forged a ruthless, dogmatic Communism, and the alternative Marxist approaches of Gramsci, the Frankfurt School of critical theory and the structuralist Marxism of Althusser in the 1960s.  Rupert Woodfin and Oscar Zarate's classic book, updated by Alex Locascio, explores the life, history, philosophy and politics of this most divisive of thinkers, and argues that Marxism remains a powerful set of ideas even today.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-178578-307-4

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Origins

The Communist Manifesto

Brief Life of Marx

Meeting Engels

The Exile, Agitator and Writer

Understanding Marx’s Theories

Three Roots of Marxian Theory

Hegel’s View of History

The Reality of Ideas

The Philosopher’s Role

The Dialectic

The Dialectic in Practice

The Dialectic in Progress

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

The First Law

The Second Law

The Third Law

The Marxian Dialectic

A Materialist World

Modernist Optimism

Dialectical Materialism

The Three Stages

The Productive Forces

The Productive Relations

Class Antagonisms

Substructure and Superstructure

A Question of Economics

Classical British Economics

What is a Commodity?

The Means of Production

The Problem of Profit

The Production System

Variable Capital and Labour Exploitation

Absolute Surplus Value

Relative Surplus Value

The Contradiction of Capitalism

The Prophecy

Organizing Capitalism’s Downfall

Consciousness of Alienation

The Nature of Alienation

Understanding Alienation

The Fetish Concept

The Categorical Imperative

Money Speaks for Us

Birth of the Communist Party

After the Revolution

Is Marxism really “Scientific”?

The Evolution of Capitalism

The Long Road to Revolution

The First International

The Paris Commune, 1871

End of the International

Towards the Second International

The Second International Membership

Weaknesses of the Second International

The Phase of Economism

Russian Marxism

Looking Ahead

Russia’s Revolutionary History

Lenin’s Bolshevik Faction

Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution

Lenin’s Revolutionary Marxism

The Age of Imperialism

A New Theory of International Revolution

Experience of Imperialism at War

The Two Revolutions of 1917

The October Revolution

The Vanguard Communist Party

The Reality of Communist Control

The Struggle for Leadership

Stalin’s Dictatorship

Why Did It “Go Wrong”?

Democracy Aborted

Lenin’s Legacy

The Conditions of Russia

The Soviet Bloc

Socialism in One Country

Stalin’s Conception of Marxism

The Cold War

Third World Marxism

The Failure of Marxism

Gramsci Confronts Fascism

Ideology and Hegemony

Culture, Ideology and Hegemony

Control of Hegemony

Revolution and Democratic Society

The Frankfurt School

Critical Theory in Dark Times

Critical Theory of the Media

Social Research for Revolution

The Hegemonic Role of Culture

Althusser’s Anti-Humanism

The Shift to Postmodernism

The Turning-Point in Marxism

“Is Anyone There?”

In a Post-Industrial Era

Seeing the Patterns

The End of History

Conflicts are in Progress

Deconstructing the End

Against “Truth Claims”

The Spirit of the Letter

Raising Marx’s Ghost

Marxism as an Ethical Programme

Defining Post-Marxism

By Way of Difference

The Dance of Différance

Post-Marxist Antagonisms

Antagonisms are Situated

The State and Civil Society

Natural “Agonistic Pluralism”

Where do we end?

Key Words in This Text

Further Reading

About the Author

About the Artist

Index

The Origins

In February 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto, on behalf of a group of idealistic workers. Originally drafted as a programme for an international “Communist League” which had its roots in the 19th-century tradition of workers’ mutual improvement societies, it became one of the most important political documents of all time. It has been as influential as the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of Rights (1789).

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS …

The Communist Manifesto

The Manifesto has left an indelible mark on human progress and still today forms the basis for a system of political beliefs that motivates millions. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the collapse of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, its authority and prestige remain for many. What did it say that seemed so important and revolutionary? The key demands, in the authors’ own words, were …

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

THESE DEMANDS WE FOLLOW WITH A STATEMENT OF BOTH PRINCIPLE AND INTENT…

“If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

It is from these words that, during the next century and a half, revolutionary action swept first across Europe and then across the world.

ALL PROPERTY RELATIONS ARE SUBJECT TO HISTORICAL CHANGE. HENCE, SLAVERY HAS RECEDED TO THE PAST …CONSIDER HOW MANY OF OUR DEMANDS HAVE BEEN MET, WHOLLY OR IN PART, SINCE 1848.

Brief Life of Marx

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Triers in the Rhineland of Germany. He was Jewish and came from a line of rabbis but his own father was a lawyer. When he was six, his family converted to Christianity and he grew up a Lutheran.

IT HAS BEEN CLAIMED THAT HIS JEWISH ANCESTRY IS IMPORTANT IN UNDERSTANDING MARX …IT GAVE HIM A SENSE OF AUTHORITY IN PROPHESYING HOW THE WORLD SHOULD DEVELOP.I WAS SHAPED BY THE REALITY OF MY TIME.

As a student, philosophy influenced him greatly, particularly the works of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). He came to reject the mystical and idealistic nature of Hegel’s work and turned to the materialistic ideas of a “Young Hegelian” disciple, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72). He was soon to move far beyond Feuerbach to the view that the everyday material conditions under which people live actually create the way they see and understand the world.

LOOK TO THE IDEA OF HISTORY, YOUNG MAN.BAH! MAN IS WHAT HE EATS.OR DOESN’T EAT …

Meeting Engels

In 1842 he was employed by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung newspaper in Cologne and became editor. Within a year, the newspaper had been shut down by the Prussian authorities because of one of Marx’s articles. He moved to Paris, then the centre of socialism, and met the influential French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) (later to become his greatest enemy). He also met Friedrich Engels (1820–95) again.

I VISITED MARX IN COLOGNE BUT WAS NOT WELL RECEIVED.SHORTLY AFTER ARRIVING IN PARIS, I READ AN ARTICLE BY ENGELS AND WAS IMPRESSED.

When Engels introduced himself again in Paris, Marx welcomed him as an intellectual equal and political brother-in-arms.

Together they went on to establish Marxism as an intellectual force. Engels’ family were rich owners of cotton-spinning factories in Manchester and Westphalia. He was able to support Marx financially in the hard times to come. But this was not his most important contribution. Marx might have spent his life in an ivory tower of intellectual speculation.

ENGELS BROUGHT ME DOWN TO EARTH. HE KNEW HOW CAPITALISM ACTUALLY WORKED AND THE EFFECTS IT HAD ON WORKING PEOPLE.IN 1845, I PUBLISHED THECONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND.

Engels also alerted Marx to the importance of Great Britain for the development of capitalism.

The Exile, Agitator and Writer

The Prussian state asked the French authorities to give Marx a hard time. He was duly thrown out of Paris in 1845. He went to Brussels and began a life of political agitation and propaganda.

I WAS ACTIVELY INVOLVED IN THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1848 IN FRANCE AND GERMANY …HE WAS EXPELLED FROM GERMANY IN 1849 AND NEVER RETURNED.

Marx even renounced his Prussian citizenship. This may have been a mistake because, some 20 years later, the first serious workers’ movement was established there, and Marx was able only to influence it from the sidelines.

Marx lived in London in relative poverty, but always rescued by Engels, for the rest of his life.

I WROTE MY BOOKS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM LIBRARY …HE ORGANISED POLITICAL GROUPS AND FEUDED WITH ALMOST EVERYONE HE CAME INTO CONTACT WITH.

Marx died in 1883 and was buried in Highgate cemetery in London. Engels died in 1895 and left everything that he had to Marx’s children.

Understanding Marx’s Theories

The Communist Manifesto was a powerful and coherent call to arms but was not scientific. It provided no thorough theoretical basis for revolution and the end of Capitalism. This would be provided by Marx and Engels’ vast output of other books, pamphlets and polemics, some published after Marx’s death.

Perhaps the best account of all their thinking is Engels’ Anti-Dühring. Professor Eugen Dühring was a German Social Democrat with whom they profoundly disagreed.

I WANT TO PRODUCE AN ENCYCLOPAEDIC SURVEY OF OUR CONCEPTION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL, NATURAL-SCIENCE AND HISTORICAL PROBLEMS.I APPROVE AND WILL CONTRIBUTE A CHAPTER ON POLITICAL ECONOMY.

Published reluctantly as a supplement by the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts in 1878, the Anti-Dühring eventually did more than any other publication to spread the Marxist position amongst thinkers and workers across the world.

The term “Marxism” has had many different meanings in the years since 1848.

AT ONE STAGE, I EVEN DECLARED THAT I WAS NOT A MARXIST!NEVERTHELESS, THE MARXISM OF MARX AND ENGELS CAN BE SEEN AS CONSISTING OF THREE PARTS …

  A philosophical basis which derives much from Hegel but which neatly inverts the key central idea of the Hegelian perspective.

  A systematic and complex set of economic and political theories which follow from the philosophical position. The most important of these being the Theory of Surplus Value and the Labour Theory of Value.

  A theory of revolution.

These points will be developed in detail as we move through the text.

Three Roots of Marxian Theory

Marx’s theories can be seen as extensions and developments of three European intellectual traditions.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS RELATES DIRECTLY TO THE GERMAN CLASSICAL TRADITION.THE THEORIES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY CAN EASILY BE TRACED TO 19TH-CENTURY BRITISH ECONOMICS.THE REVOLUTIONARY THEORY HAS ITS ORIGINS IN FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT.

V.I. Lenin (1870–1924) himself explicitly recognized this, which is interesting in the light of later attempts to minimize the importance of Western thought for Communism.

Hegel’s View of History

Any understanding of Marxism requires an examination of its roots in the Hegelian tradition. Hegel had a unique and radical view of history. Most historians and philosophers prior to Hegel had seen it as a random and contingent series of events linked in a crudely causal way. Hegel, on the other hand, saw history as a process of development. To understand one part demands an understanding of the whole.

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF ONE EVENT CAN BE IMPROVED TO THE EXTENT THAT WE UNDERSTAND ALL THE EVENTS THAT PRECEDED IT.I ACCEPT THAT. BUT WHAT EXACTLY IS “DEVELOPING”?

The Reality of Ideas

Like Plato (427–347 BC), Hegel thought that the only things that are really real “are ideas”.

I ARGUE THAT THESE IDEAS ARE PERFECT AND ETERNAL.I BELIEVE THAT IDEAS ARE DYNAMIC, IMPERFECT NOW, BUT CAPABLE OF PERFECTION.THIS IS A MYSTICAL WORLD VIEW. HEGEL’S CONCEPT OF THE ULTIMATE AND PERFECT IDEA – THE “ABSOLUTE” – IS REALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM GOD.

Hegel claimed that reality was essentially reason and logic – “whatever is rational is real, and whatever is real is rational”. There really is a cosmic principle of rationality. This implies that whatever actually happens is part of the cosmic plan and therefore ultimately justifiable. Hegel’s idea was of great comfort to the Prussian state, who adopted him as official philosopher.

Hegel also believed that questions about the material world are pointless or meaningless. They are only questions about the ideas that we have of the material world. Mind is part of nature and the natural is made up of pure idea.

THE ABSOLUTE, THE ULTIMATE IDEA, CONTAINS EVERYTHING – INCLUDING OUR OWN EXPERIENCES – AND TIME ITSELF. IT THEREFORE CONTAINS HISTORY.SO HISTORY IS THE PROCESS OF THE ABSOLUTE “UNFOLDING ITSELF”. THE END OF THIS UNFOLDING PROCESS IS THE REALIZATION OF THE ULTIMATELY AND FINALLY REAL …WHICH MEANS, IN HEGEL’S OWN TIME, THE PRUSSIAN STATE!

Hegel thought that the most highly developed aspect of the Absolute was the idea of the state. He is blamed for originating the two most potent and dangerous ideas of the 20th century: Fascism, through his veneration of the state, and Communism, through his idea of the inevitability of progress.

The Philosopher’s Role

Although Hegel believed in a dynamic and developing system of ideas, with an ultimate and inevitable goal, he nevertheless did not concern himself with the future. He saw no role for himself nor for any philosophers in predicting or recommending a particular future.

WE CAN ONLY HAVE WISDOM IN HINDSIGHT. “THE OWL OF MINERVA (WISDOM) SPREADS ITS WINGS ONLY WITH THE FALLING OF THE LIGHT.”I DISAGREE VEHEMENTLY WITH THAT! THE JOB OF PHILOSOPHERS IS NOT TO REFLECT ON THE WORLD “AS IT IS” BUT TO CHANGE IT.

The Dialectic

Hegel’s idealism did provide an answer to the question of how precisely the “unfolding of ideas” takes place. The key concept, and the idea most effectively adopted by Marx, was that of the dialectic. We tend to regard a particular idea, or “explanation”, or “theory” as something that stands alone. It represents some aspect of reality and is self-sufficient.

IF WE UNDERSTAND HOW A STEAM-ENGINE WORKS, THEN THAT’S ALL THERE IS TO IT. WE DON’T NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING ELSE TO MAKE IT WORK.THIS IS WRONG. IF WE EXAMINE ANY IDEA CAREFULLY WE FIND THAT IT IS ALWAYS LINKED TO SOME OTHER IDEAS …… EITHER BECAUSE IT ACTUALLY CONTRADICTS THEM OR BECAUSE IT SOLVES PROBLEMS OR CONTRADICTIONS IN THE OTHER IDEAS.CLEARLY, IDEAS OR EXPLANATIONS CHANGE OVER TIME, THROUGH HISTORY.

Therefore, since our world is an idea or set of ideas, the history of our world is actually the history of these ideas and the way they are linked together.

The Dialectic in Practice

Take, for example, the question of why things fall down. Aristotle believed they did so because all things had an innate tendency to go either upwards or downwards. Consequently, the speed at which something falls is determined by two factors, the resistance of the material it is travelling through (generally air or water) and its weight.

A