Marx view on Capitalism & Government/Politics.

Contemporary Marxism : Exploring Marx 's Ideas on Capitalism and Politics

Since time immemorial , the world has witnessed a proliferation of ideologies that sought to explain , justify , rationalize , and enlist supporters . Karl Marx is famous for his theoretical attack against all of these ideologies , particularly capitalism , and denounced them as these exploit the working class . Marx 's writings on the conflicts inherent in capitalism led to the formulation of communist ideals and many would say , to the rise of communist societies in the twentieth century . According to Marx , the various ideologies of Liberalism

br Conservatism , and even of Communitarian Socialism merely served to preserve the power of the exploiting classes

Marx viewed that all social and political phenomena and institutions arose from the economic base of productive means and modes . Roughly defined as raw materials , techniques , and human and mechanical energy the means and modes of production were the economic foundations of society . Marx maintained that the essence of capitalist property is the control of the productive process and therefore the control over laborers . Forced labor rather than low wages , alienation of labor rather than alienation of the product of labor are , according to Marx the essence of capitalist exploitation (Medio 1977 ,

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Marx 's criticisms of capitalism make it clear in which social arrangements have failed utterly to accommodate the capacity for self-actualization , which the social powers of production have put within people 's reach . According to the Communist Manifesto

The bourgeoisie during scarcely a hundred years of its rule has created productive powers more massive and colossal than all past generations together . The subjection of nature 's powers , machinery , application of chemistry to industry and agriculture , steam navigation , railways . - what earlier century dreamed that such productive powers slumbered in the womb of social labor (p . 56

Revolution and social change was re-established and brought to the level of the philosophical with a method of work for social analysis and political programming with the publication of the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital . From then on , the world soon witnessed the birth of socialist states founded along the ideological framework laid down by Marx though not without fundamental adjustments in form and substance In the Communist Manifesto , Marx recognized the progression of the nature of struggle - of the shift in classes and how these classes would interact or affect each other and how these classes developed astride the political-economic line

Reality or the actual historical paths which societies took , appeared not to easily yield predictions in spite of the methodical construct of Marx . As in Russia and China , it looked like there is no need to pass through a fully matured capitalist system with a substantial working class population that there is a shortcut in seizing power incorporating the peasantry in the revolutionary model . Hence in Russia , for example , the anti-Czarist or anti-monarchial movement jumped to socialist reconstruction under the leadership of Lenin and the communist party in 1907 . Later after World War II , China fell into the same pattern...