Marxism – What is it?
Marxism – What is it?
What Marxism is, why it is a science and not an ideology, and why the world only becomes understandable with it – completely comprehensible.
Note: This article is not intended for people like Peter Decker or Slavoj Zizek; explanations such as dialectics and idealism are intentionally over-simplified so that this article is especially accessible to non-Marxists.
Additionally, we deliberately chose the generic masculine form, although we are actually critical of it, to make this text accessible to a broader audience (especially from the non-left milieu).
The Marxist view, contrary to common belief, is not a “political ideology” but a solid science.
Unlike political ideologies like liberalism or conservatism, Marxism is just a way to understand the reality in its objective structures.
Here, the persons Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are of the same importance as Isaac Newton is for gravity; they developed ways to recognize and define what already exists, but did not invent it.
What is the content of Marxism?
Marxism, aside from bourgeois understanding, is also not to be equated with socialism or communism.
It is true that Marxist analysis often concludes that a different form of society than the existing bourgeois (i.e., capitalist) order is needed – but Marxism is not an appeal to socialism; it is merely a way to understand the structure of reality.
So, it is only an appeal to socialism in the same way that 1+1 is an appeal to 2.
Materialism
The most important pillar of Marxism (equally as important as the eyes for an optician) is dialectical materialism.
Materialism is not the pursuit of material wealth but the essential method of Marxism.
The dialectical materialism assumes that ideas, philosophy, ideology, social structure, and interpersonal relations originate from the relations in which society is structured at the level of production.
This may sound abstract, but it is actually very simple, precisely because it is objectively correct – to illustrate:
Most people are probably familiar with the quote by Marx, where he describes religion as the “opium of the people” – But how is that dialectically materialist?
Religion is a mental construct; its content cannot be touched, whether you are a believer or not.
Marx says that this mental construct (religion) serves as a painkiller (opium) against the suffering of the people, and that this suffering originates from it.
People suffer, so they believe, hoping it will make them feel better.
The suffering in any society stems from the structuring of property relations; imagine, abstractly, a person in a society owns everything, while others own nothing – that would bring much suffering, whether through hunger, poverty, or unequal power relations.
And that’s basically it: Ideas always stem from the material (meaning objectively existing) relations in a society that structure production and property. (To make it more concrete)
Okay, and what about “dialectics”?
Dialectics is the way in which contradictions within society and its structures can be analyzed (that’s why Marxists always speak of contradictions).
The principle of dialectics traces back to the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who, through his philosophy of idealism, was essentially a precursor to Marx’s materialism.
Hegel believed, in contrast to Marx, that ideas are the determining factor in society, i.e., that, for example, the history of humanity is shaped by certain ideal images like freedom and equality, which in turn influence production, social change, and structures.
Marx understood this very differently (it’s said Marx “turned Hegel on his head”) and realized that the important ideas in society originate from relations of production and not from something spiritual or abstract.
However, Marx adopted Hegel’s method of dialectics.
To make this less abstract with an example:
We know that materialism assumes that political ideologies, ruling relations, philosophies, and everything non-objective stems from the structures that organize production.
And where exactly does such an idea come from?
With dialectics, we can look at the contradictions present in a society, which then lead to the formation of the corresponding mental construct, which Marx calls the “superstructure” (superstructure of the “base”, which Marx understands as the way production is managed).
From the contradiction between blue and yellow, green emerges – again, more abstract, so let’s make it more concrete:
The main contradiction; Capital and Labour
In a capitalist society, the main contradiction is between capital and labor (i.e., between those who own and those who produce).
Of course, everyone owns something; for Marxists, “private property” refers to means of production (like factories, commercial real estate, machinery), i.e., ownership of things that are used by society or produce commodities used by society but are owned by private individuals.
From this contradiction between capital and labor, emerge patriarchal structures, exploitation of the Global South, right-wing extremism, and nearly every war of the last 80 years – quite a lot for a single contradiction, but how does that happen? This is explained by dialectics, which allows us to look into the future.
The contradiction between capital and labor is characterized by the fact that an employee in a capitalist system must sell their working time without actually having any share in what they produce.
Only the employer (or capitalist, i.e., the person who owns the means of production) can transform the worker’s labor power into a product and turn it into a commodity because they have control over the production process.
Again, more abstract; let’s clarify this with an example.
Imagine a factory (it could just as well be an e-commerce company, a law firm, or a medical practice) where 10 people work.
The factory belongs to one person, who owns the machines that the 10 employees operate.
The employees, who produce the goods, generate a revenue of 200 euros per day.
Each employee receives a wage of 10 euros at the end of the day, just enough to come back to work the next day (Marx calls this “reproduction costs”).
After deducting labor costs, the owner is left with 100 euros at the end of the day – although they did not generate this amount themselves, it was produced by the employees.
This surplus Marx calls “surplus value,” which he calculates as the difference between the value of a commodity and the sum of the values necessary for its production (variable capital).
The variable capital, minus the constant capital (raw material costs, electricity, rent, etc.), results in 80 euros for the capitalist, which constitutes their profit.
The surplus value is thus the product of the contradiction between capital (the owner and their control of machines) and labor (the value of the workers’ labor power).
Well, that is the main contradiction of a capitalist society – and now what? It’s okay, the factory owner also has “risks” and “responsibility,” so they should earn more than the workers.
Let’s think one (or two) steps further.
The factory owner makes a profit of 80 euros, which they mostly reinvest into the factory to enable growth (economic growth).
Now, there is a second factory, which grows at a similar pace and takes market share from our factory owner (competition).
To counter this competition, the capitalist must invest more money into their business, which often leads to lowering wages for workers.
To stay competitive, the other factory also cuts wages, forcing our factory owner to produce in a country with cheaper labor and import some resources cheaply from abroad (exploitation of the Global South).
Our factory has now grown, and our owner is able to acquire the competing company – expanding their production capacity.
The region in the Global South from which they source some resources and labor experiences political unrest and installs a leader who wants to end the cheap extraction of resources by foreign capitalists.
This does not sit well with our factory owner, who now has 1,000 employees and is accustomed to a luxurious lifestyle – so they convert their financial capital into political capital (lobbying) and influence the government to overthrow the foreign ruler, who threatens their capital interests, and replace them with a ruler who does not pose a problem to their capital interests (see Libya war, Iraq war, Banana Wars, Contra War, Bay of Pigs, Chile 1974, etc.).
If the government fails to overthrow the ruler (which is rare), measures like sanctions and embargoes are imposed to prevent trade with that country (embargoes, sanctions), causing the country and its regime to eventually collapse (Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Vietnam, DPRK etc.).
Within our factory’s country, people are dissatisfied with their standard of living; they see that the owner, who employs 10,000 workers, pays them very low wages and they have no share in the rising profits (gap between rich and poor).
Don’t worry; our factory owner has a solution.
One of the wars initiated by the capitalist interests of the owner recently forced thousands of people to flee to the factory owner’s country – so they come up with the idea to blame the workers from the other country (who are in the same economic role as the workers from the factory owner’s country) for rising prices and lower wages, instead of their international monopoly struggles.
To spread this view, the factory owner gives a few percent of the profits to a handful of political actors so that their interests are still represented politically (lobbying as a whole, extreme: Hitler’s meeting with the Industry Club Düsseldorf, AfD “secret meetings”).
Through the apathy and frustration caused by monotonous work (alienation), the workers believe in charismatic political actors hoping for a better life.
When these actors come to power, they don’t hold back; they continue to oppose the factory owner’s interests, which the workers still oppose (see 100,000 socialists, communists, and social democrats murdered in Hitler fascism’s concentration camps, Chile, genocides in Indonesia, etc.).
That was quite quick—from the greedy factory owner to the concentration camp. (Click here to find out how fascism arises)
Of course, this is intentionally hyperbolic; but the exploitation of the global South that underpins this leads to destabilization of foreign markets, wars, poverty, and exploitation.
This contradiction also underpinned Hitler’s fascism, which exploited the frustration of people after the economic crisis of the 1920s, antisemitic resentments (which German capitalists instrumentalized), and revenge ideas after the First World capitalist war.
The suffering in Palestine: Why does Israel have such a large lobby in Western politics? The profit (!) of Western corporations depends on geopolitical presence in the otherwise capitalist-hostile Middle East (More on the capitalist character of the Gaza war)
Dialectical materialism allows us to recognize these connections; from the contradiction between the profit motives of the factory owner and the wage demands of the workers, i.e., the contradiction between capital and labor, every historical phenomenon, ideology, form of rule, philosophy, aversion, and affection since the advent of wage labor can be explained.
Because from one contradiction, many others follow; such as the contradiction between rule and the people, which the AfD now exploits.
And this is not ideological, but objective and understandable.
Non-Marxist, non-materialist explanations – including left-liberalism – do not provide answers to questions like: why does capitalism develop into fascism? Why does the standard of living stagnate in Germany despite decades of increasing productivity and economic growth? Why do capitalist states wage wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza? Why is Germany rich and the Congo poor?
Only dialectical materialism, which questions the material structure and contradictions of that structure, answers all these questions objectively and correctly.
To resolve this contradiction, production must be planned and in the hands of those who actually produce.
Then capital (ownership of production) is equal to labor (production), the main contradiction is resolved, and with it all the symptoms of this contradiction explained above.
“I am convinced that there is only one way to eliminate these evils, namely the establishment of a socialist economic system, accompanied by an educational system oriented towards social goals. In such an economy, the means of production belong to society itself and their use is planned. A planned economy that adapts production to the needs of the community would distribute work among all who can work. It would guarantee everyone a livelihood. Education would aim to develop individuals’ innate abilities and foster social responsibility instead of glorifying power and success, as in our current society.” (Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?)