The Formulation of Marxism

There is a tendency for Communism’s advocates to unconditionally deify Marx and for its opponents to unconditionally denounce him. From the materialistic standpoint, Marx is absolutely right in his analysis and conclusion. However, from an idealistic viewpoint, because Communism is a militant idea viewing certain factions as absolute enemies and advocates revolution to overthrow the ruling class, he is a dangerous figure. To reach a more objective understanding of him, we should consider him in relation to the Unification Principle.

Marx was a man of thoroughly militant disposition. By nature he was exclusive and self-righteous. He was intolerant toward those who disagreed with him, and he despised anyone who doubted the validity of his view and did not follow his way of thinking.

He belittled the life-style, interests, and values of the bourgeoisie. This was probably because he had a new view of life. However, he refused to apply ethical principles to solve problems and he did not like to see mere kindness and friendliness among people. With his family and colleagues he made an exception, but his treatment of all other people was based solely on whether or not they would be of use to him in his political fight. Until the last moment of his life he was a thinker. He was relentless to his political enemies. Those who did not agree with him were either betrayers, moral criminals or political idiots (from Sidney Hook, Marx and Marxists).

Marx could not merely observe dispassionately the social conditions of his time-which so drastically needed change. Today, however, our social and historical conditions are quite different. Today a spiritual revolution is needed, not a violent one as Marx advocated. Had he lived in this age, Marx also would surely have seen the necessity of a spiritual revolution. What is a spiritual revolution? It is the worldwide spreading of God’s truth which will build the originally planned earthly paradise out of the rubble of our confined and chaotic history.

Reacting against these deplorable social conditions, Marx concluded that it was absolutely necessary to overthrow the bourgeoisie.

To accomplish this the laborers had to be tightly united, capable of carrying on wide-spread and continuous struggle; they had to be ignited with revolutionary fervor. To do this, a consistent system of thought had to be built. Thus, formulated under the banner of proletarian liberation, Marx’s ideology appeared on the stage of history.

Idealistic view of history

To be completely convincing, Marx sought to prove that it was a necessary historical task to overthrow the capitalist class. Hence he had to revolutionize the traditional idealistic view of history. According to the idealistic philosophers, history develops by divine providence, through the actions of outstanding leaders. Therefore, they thought that their social system was sacred and closed to change. Such a complete acceptance of one’s social system is evident in Aristotle’s assertion that the slave system of this time was divinely ordained and therefore everlasting. Likewise, Thomas Aquinas, the chief philosopher at the peak of feudalism, maintained that the feudal hierarchy, with the Pope at the top and the serfs at the bottom, was eternal.

It seemed to Marx that the idealistic historians of his time defended capitalist society in the same way. The idealists held that all men were equal and had free will. They thus made a contract with each other whereby one party worked and the other party payed the other’s wages. To idealists such a system contained no inequality. They consequently defended capitalism and ignored the facts of exploitation and domination. However, Marx saw idealism as an intolerable, reactionary barrier to the accomplishment of his historical task. His first goal, therefore, was a thorough criticism of the idealistic view of history and the establishment of his own view. This is his so-called materialistic view of history, obtained by the application of the dialectic to materialism.

Dialectical materialism

Applying Hegel’s dialectics to the materialism of Feuerbach, which he accepted after critiquing it, Marx

established dialectical materialism. According to Stalin, dialectical materialism sees the world as a complex unit of interrelated parts which are not completed and static, but rather constantly changing through genesis and extinction, progression and regression, and growth and decay.

It does not view individuals independently, but always relative to the whole, in which diverse changes occur through the union and struggle of contradictory elements. Each thing has contradictory elements within itself, which continue unity and struggle causing change and development. For instance in an egg, the embryo and the egg itself contradict each other and as these two contradictory parts continue union and struggle, the embryo grows and gradually fills the egg. Finally it breaks the shell, and the chick emerges. The result is neither egg nor embryo, but a new creation: a chick. Marx asserted that such a process is the law of development. He furthermore applied this law to general social development.

Marx held that each economic society in history has had two elements within itself which struggled against each other. The two fundamental elements are production relations and the power of production. While production power continuously develops, the production relationship inevitably hinders the development of production power at a certain stage of social evolution. Hence as a result of the struggle between these two elements, the existing society will collapse and a new economic society shall appear. Therefore, capitalist society will finally and inevitably decay according to the law of historical development and a new society will arise. According to Marx, this will be the proletarian society or Communist society. This is the outline of the Marxist materialistic view of history.

Marx was not contented with that alone. In order to prove the historical inevitability of the decay of capitalist society, he made a detailed analytical study of the capitalist economy based on the theory from the English classics of economics written by Adam Smith and David Ricardo-that value is created by labor. This study became his own economic theory, entitled Capital. Through this study he proved that within the capitalist structure several economic laws were operating which would eventually bring capitalism to destruction. Before this time, nobody else had dreamt of these laws. Lenin praised Marx’s achievement, saying that the materialistic view of history was no longer hypothetical, but a science.

Marx’s laws of economic movement included: 1) the law of centralization of capital, 2) the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and 3) the law of increasing poverty.

All these laws are derived from the labor theory of value and the theory of surplus value. To summarize this theory: in a capitalist society individual capitalists will inevitably compete with one another.

As a result of this competition, profits will become less and less, and finally small capitalists will be expropriated. The wealth will then be concentrated in the hands of a few big capitalists. On the other hand, laborers will become poorer and poorer. Their number will multiply until they form the majority of society. Because of this the capitalist economic structure will eventually fall by itself.

What, then, is the final and decisive moment to cause the capitalist society to fall? It is the proletarian revolution. Marx maintained the following:

Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital…grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers…

Centralization of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Part VIII, Chapter XXXII, p. 763).

Thus, according to the Communists’ words, Marx’s doctrine became the most effective weapon for the class struggle and planted strong revolutionary consciousness and firm conviction of victory in the proletarian heart. Marx’s doctrine was not formulated as a mere theory, but even in the beginning its purpose was to create revolution and to serve as a guide for revolutionary action. This was Marx’s strong point as well as his fatal weakness, for his thought was formulated wholly to achieve his purpose of justifying violent revolution. Therefore his theory could not be a universal truth, but was only a product of his epoch. It was destined to be discarded in time. Marx’s thought was applicable in his time, but today many errors in his doctrine have been exposed. For this reason it has been modified by different people. It is now only a relic of the past.