Marx

The guardian claims that the credit crunch was the end of capitalism. In the 50s and 60s people would’ve said that the credit crunch was proof that capitalism wasn’t working and that communism was the answer. The Soviet Union based all of its principles on Marx and the Soviet Union collapsed, it was known as the “god that failed”. Marx was originally from Germany and did all of his work in London at the peak of the industrial revolution. He himself was a revolutionary and defined the century that followed. “capitalism comes into the world dripping from head to foot in the dirt, sweat and blood of the worker”. He was born in 1818 in Germany to Jewish parents but converted to Lutherism. He met and became firm friends with Fredrich Engels in 1844. Engels ran a factory in Manchester and saw capitalism rent in tooth and claw. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. He was a journalist and an editor for radical newspapers in Europe. What he was writing earned him many enemies which meant that he had to flee to England, where he found a sanctuary in London. Marx avoided metaphysics, he said that philosophy up to this point had only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.

                 Marx believed that you could explain everything about a society by analysing the way economic forces in shape social, religious, legal and political processes. He believed that world processes were subsistent on economics. Marx saw man as productive, mankind creates the landscape in inhabits “not a figure in the landscape, but the shaper of the landscape”. He believed in a teleological view, that history is driving towards an end. This is Hegelian, Marx believed that we are moving unstoppably towards a certain point, and that everything has a purpose. Marx studied facts relentlessly; he used the empiricist method (I think therefore I am). He supported the French revolution as he thought that revolution was a way of speeding up the teleological process. Darwin kind of put a shadow over other philosophers, his methods were extremely scientific and Marx tried to emulate this. He went to the British museum and went through all the data he could get. He was working methodically/empirically through all his data.

                Hegel believed history was driving towards something and that the spirit (Geist) was driving it towards a state where the spirit knows itself. Key to this is conflict (dialectic), conflict and change are at the heart of this process. To understand Marx you must understand Hegel. Marx disagreed with a lot of what Hegel said but he liked the process of it. What he didn’t like was the mysticism of Hegel’s work. Hegel was talking about a metaphysical battle between good and evil, Marx just transplanted it to the real world, the real dialectic was class conflict, rooted in money. Marx was always trying to apply Hegel’s theory to the real world. Marx was firmly on the side of the workers, the proletariat, who he believed had been on the wrong side of the dialectic forever. He couldn’t understand why people would put themselves through 20 hour days when they had nothing and no hope of changing it. He said “you have nothing to lose but your chains and you have the world to win”. He told them to get up and fight but they didn’t. The reason he came up for this is Alienation, another way of thinking about this is estrangement or separation. Marx thought that the barrier which stopped people from being what was natural to them was capitalism. Capitalism alienates men from themselves and from each other. Marx thought that when we are at work we are not truly ourselves, work is keeping us separate from ourselves.

                Marx blamed the bourgeoisie for this; they made us wage-labourers, the job makes us unhappy, yet however unhappy we get we won’t quit because we need it. Marx saw this as the process of freedom.
Thesis: The bourgeoisie (free market capitalism, liberal state, individual rights)
Antithesis: The proletariat
Synthesis: Socialism.      

                According to Marx, capitalism was always doomed to fail “capitalism produces all things in profusion, but most of all it produces its own grave-diggers”. Inherent in this system is the fact that it doesn’t work. The commodities that we work to buy are unaffordable with our wages, he said the system would therefore never work in the long run. Marx however, didn’t envisage how flexible capitalism can be, but he believed that it would, eventually collapse. He believed that there would be a violent revolution, chaos and murder and bloodshed. He thought that conflict was the way for progress to happen, out of this would be socialism. There would be the dictatorship of the proletariat, where the wealth of the society would be spread around. This is the second stage. Once the wealth had been spread around, the state that had been created would just wither away. We wouldn’t need a state anymore, there would be no poverty because we would all have an equal share. Then and only then would we have communism, this is utopian because he believed this would be heaven. “From each according to their ability to each according to their need” this means that there is no dissemination between skills. People give what they’re able to and get what they need.

The revolutions 1848 – Spring of Nations

There was a Europe wide explosion of revolutions – France, Italy, Austria, Germany. Most were put down because the British empire was growing quickly. There was a massive flowering of intellectual life between 1848 and 1933 in Germany. The Zeitgeist of the day was revolution. From all of this Germany became the ideal of the perfect nation. Hegel thought that Prussia was pretty much heaven on earth. He identified it as a super-state. The revolution in Germany failed, the middle classes could not get access to power and therefore became focused on culture, education and intellectual success. This is part of Germanys dominance, they had the founding in mythology based on Hegel’s view that Prussians were the super-race.