Karl Marx and Marxism

Marxism. Eulogy and Detraction

In East Marx is no longer reffered to as he is held responsible for the totalitarian catastrophe. In West he is still disputed but, almost always, his views are no longer connected to all that they have determined. Some read Marx particularly for the “evil� he is assumed with, for the horrors of communism. Others, read him just for political reasons. I read Marx so as to be completely able to demonstrate that Marxism may still represent an adequate way of dealing with some of today’s “social superstructures�, as Marx himself named them: literature, religion, law etc. That Marxism as an intellectual perspective may still provide a wholesome counterbalance to our propensity too see ourselves and the writers that we read as completely divorced from socio-economic circumstances. That Marxism may also counterbalance the related tendency to read the books and poems we read as originating in an autonomous mental realm, as the free products of free and independent minds…

In order to achieve such a goal, one must get to the essence of things and imperiously provide the adverse standpoints on the matter. Therefore, both eulogy and detraction of Marxism will be reffered to in the following lines.

Marxism is first of all a complex political doctrine, also dealing with economy, philosophy or even religious issues. Based upon the writtings of the German born sociologist Karl Marx (1818-1883) and, to a smaller extent, of his companion Friederich Engels (1820-1895), this set of revolutionary “theses� had – surprisingly perhaps for many contemporaries – an unprecedented impact upon the thinking of the age.

Thus, as far as the political aspect is concerned, Marx and Engels are falsely considered the founders of socialism and all its variants. However, what today is called socialism was developed during the previous century by the French ideologists Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and their folowers. It is true though that socialism, non-political in both Saint-Simon’s and Fourier’s visions, was decissively influenced by the reformist dimenssion Karl Marx provided it with, reffering to his forerunners as “utopic socialists�. (Florence Braunstein & Jean-Francois Pepin, Les Grandes doctrines, 1995:71) In short, the aim of Marxism is to bring about a classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribu¬tion, and exahange. Marxism is a materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming thc existence of a world or of forces beyond the natural world around us, and the society we live in.