Anyhoo, I thought we could have a little discussion about Marx's philosophy, the way that it's been employed over the years, and whether it's really stood the test of time.
For those of you that don't know much about Marx and his various theories, I'll give a brief explanation of some of it, but you'd do much better to look at sites like these:
http://sfr-21.org/manifesto.html
http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5o.htm
http://radicalacademy.com/philmarx.htm
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/marx.html
Sorry if those are of dubious origin, but the philosophy's all correct. On to a key feature of Marx's philosophy...
Alienation:
Marx said that what separates a human from animals is "free, conscious activity". That is, man is able to determine what he does because he is conscious. So humans are conscious and free; by doing things freely they become happy because they are following their nature.
Labour is a good example of man expressing his nature: men choose to produce things because, hey, they feel like it. Therefore, they should gain fulfillment from working, because they're doing what they want. By working freely, "man makes his life an object of his own free will". Hooray.
When a worker makes an object, he is realising his labour. Here, I mean that he is making his labour into something real and tangible. The things that labourers produce therefore are of some value to those people, because they are their creative output and hence, to quite a large extent, represent their own humanity.
In a capitalist society such as the one that Marx was in (Germany and frequently Britain), workers were pretty much free to work for whoever they wanted. Therefore, they were free in one sense. However, in a capitalist society, the worker doesn't get to keep hold of the things that he produces. Everything he produces gets nicked by whoever's in charge (and here I'm talking more about industrial workers, or people who work in large organisations) and sold off. All the worker gets at the end of the day is a few meaningless dollars/pounds/talents/sheafs of corn and marching orders for the next day. Thus, the worker is completely alienated from what he or she has produced. They'd just spent a whole day putting all of their effort into making things, and the boss comes along and takes away whatever they've produced - and hey! that was a fundamental expression of the workers' humanity!
To Marx, who had just established that individual workers' products were rather important to them, this was entirely unsatisfactory, and he went off and wrote a long and impenetrably worded series of writings called Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Here he said that because people were completely alienated from the things they had produced, they were pretty much completely alienated from the action of producing. In other words, because they weren't getting at the end of the day what they'd made, they weren't really enjoying their work. People ended up feeling like commodities and not people, and to Marx that was the main reason for all of society's problems. People didn't enjoy their main activity (work), and so ended up having to enjoy their leisure activities (sex, drugs and rock and roll) or just plain getting angry. People also tended to become lazy and unproductive, both in their workplace and with other people.
Not only do people become poorly-developed humans, they also start worshipping money (
!), which they are being paid with. They then go off and seek money desperately, which, ironically, only makes things worse in the workplace. They work harder to get more money, so produce more things for their bosses to nick, and so make their bosses all the more rich and powerful. When their bosses become more powerful, the situation just becomes more exaggerated. More factories are opened, more workers end up in that awful position, more people are degraded. They also spend money, and think of nothing but material possessions. Thus society becomes increasingly materialistic and debauched, and capitalism becomes ever stronger. Eek!
To Marx, the proletariat was the ultimate example of the ills of capitalism. The proletariats are those people with no property (other than the basic rudiments), and thus no social class. They are the working class. The only factor of production that they owned was their own labour, and they had to sell that to heartless bourgeois factory-owners, so that they could earn enough to live.
As we have seen, by selling their labour, they became alienated from it, and thus became unfulfilled human beings. Other, higher classes (the bourgeoisie) controlled the factors of production, and so did not need to work so hard (or even at all). They did not sacrifice so much of their humanity by working. The proletariat was therefore the apotheosis of the ills of capitalism.
Marx said that the only reasonable thing for proles to do was completely abolish capitalism - and specifically the notion of property and ownership, which underlaid capitalism and meant that the bosses had the right to take away the things they produced - so that they could reclaim their humanity. A new order was to be established, in which everyone had a healthy relationship with everything they produced, and this order was Communism. Hurrah.
So, that's one of the big chunks of Communism (and don't you feel cleverer for reading it?), which I hope you understood. There's a couple of other chunks, but I won't go into them yet. I think there's a lot to discuss here. What do people think of all that? Can they see any flaws that undermine the theory? or is everyone so overwhelmed by Marx that they're going to sign up to their local Communist party tomorrow?
