I am writing this review after almost six years. I read
this book back in summer 2013. Karl Marx was born in Trier in 1818 and he died
in 1893.
Marx spent a lot of his time with Young Hegelian
intellectuals. He tried his career in journalism. Marx was expelled from Paris
for subversive journalism. He met Engels who was the son of a Rhenish cotton
spinner. Engels brought Marx a practical acquaintance with the workings of
capitalism, provided source of financial assistance and one firm friendship
that Marx enjoyed throughout his life. Marx could not complete his work on
political economy due to his involvement in the International Workingmen’s
Association, commonly known as the first International.
For Marx the proletariat was destined to assume the
universal role that Hegel had misleadingly assigned to the bureaucracy. Marx
wrote about alienated labor. This labor had four aspects to it. First, the worker
was related to his labor as to an alien objet. Second, the worker did not view
his work as part of his real life. Third, man’s social essence was taken away
from him in his work which did not represent the harmonious efforts of man as a
“species being”. Fourth, man found himself alienated from other men.
Marx considers “communism
as the positive abolition of private property and thus of human self-alienation
and therefore the real re-appropriation of the human essence by and for man.
This is communism as the complete and conscious return of man himself as a
social, i.e., human being.”
Discussing history, the author quotes from the Communist
Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto
existing societies is the history of a class struggles.” Marx wrote that “society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and
proletariat”: and the same view reappears in capital. Marx espouses a materialist
conception of history.
Explaining economics, the author states that Marx gave the
labor theory of value, according to which the value of objects was measured by
the amount of Labor embodied in them. Marx paints a grim picture of the fate of
the working class. He says that “within
the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of
labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer”. It was Engels,
in 1844 who guided Marx’s interest to economics and introduced him at first
hand to British Capitalism. Engels survived Marx by thirteen years. He was the
keeper of Marx’s archives and began editing his manuscripts of the remaining volumes
of Capital.
Under the theme of politics Marx main target was the state.
He considered state as the central institution of capitalist society. Marx viewed
state as an instrument of class domination. The large-scale industry and
universal competition of modern capitalism had created their own political
organization- the modern liberal democratic state under which the bourgeoisie
could best develop its class potential. Moreover, he believes that after a successful
proletarian revolution there would be a period of transition which he occasionally
referred to as “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. He associated the word
dictatorship with the Roman office of dictatura,
where all power was legally concentrated in the hands of a single man during a
limited period in a time of crisis.
Marx appeared to be a philosopher, a humanist with not only
a devastating account of the alienation of man in capitalist society but also
in rich and varied account of the potential latent in every individual waiting
to be realized under communism. Later in many developing nations Marxism
combined with nationalism functions as an ideology for mass participation in
the modernization process. The author substitutes the people of Asia, Africa,
and Latin America as “external proletariat” in the place of the industrial
working class in which Marx placed such hope.
The ideas of Marx have been an inspiration and has had a
significant impact on a large section of humanity over the last century.
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