HCJ2 - Come the Revolution!

As you can probably guess from the title, this post will be about revolution, more specifically Karl Marx and the revolution he envisaged.

First of all, I'll begin with a bit about Karl Marx himself.

He studied law, philosophy and then revolution.

He published the Communist Manifesto in 1848 along with Frederich Engels. Karl Marx was actually a journalist and editor of radical newspapers in Europe. He fled to London after publishing the CM and lived there until his death in 1883.

Although he started off as quite conservative (probably because of his father) but turned into a radical and began to publish his ideas, I think that his ideas can be summed up by a quote from him on his tombstone - "Workers of the world unite".


Marx's ideas

He believed that a society could be explained if you analysed economic factors and how they changed religion, legal and political processes.

He was technological deterministic - this means that he thought that technology drives change in society, instead of society driving technology.

Marx achieved a mixture of 3 key ideas:

1: Hegelian philosophy (especially history).
2: British empiricism (especially Smith).
3: French Revolution politics.

He worked through masses of data at tried to make socialism and the study of society in general scientific.

Marx saw the real struggle being class struggle, this can be seen across history e.g. lord and serf and Marx's concept of Bourgeoisie v.s. Proletariat. Marx was most definitely on the side of the Proletariat.

According to Marx, the Proletariat had "nothing to lose but their chains", they had everything to gain and the world to win. However, alienation (separation from society) was stopping the Proletariat fighting their suppression and the main cause is capitalism.

Work is the loss of the self and doesn't develop mind or body. The Bourgeoisie own the factories and places where the Proletariat work. "It has converted lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers".


COMMUNISM

Thesis: Capitalism and the liberal state.

Antithesis: The Proletariat

Synthesis: SOCIALISM

According to Marx, Capitalism seeds its own destruction, here's an example: A worker who makes tables in a factory earns £5 a week, these tables are then sold by the factory owner for £10 (thus making £5 profit), the worker who made the tables can't afford to buy one.

There will a violent revolution (for Marx, violence was the only way to achieve anything), the Proletariat will rise up and dispossess the Bourgeoisie of power and influence - society would be under the dictatorship of the Proletariat.

No government would be needed and it would simply wither away, this is when full-on Communism would come into being.

An example (quoted by Horrie) is from the song Imagine by John Lennon "Imagine there's no countries...no religion...Imagine no possessions".

A famous quote from Karl Marx (it also forms a basic Socialist principle) "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need". There would be no different levels/classes in society, it would just be one classless utopia.


TB 2012