The Value of Marxist Theory

The Value of Marxist History

You may be surprised to learn that in a BBC online poll in 2009, Karl Marx topped the list of the millennium’s greatest thinkers (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/461545.stm). Marx remains, as Matt Perry puts in his book Marxism and History, “the best hated man of his times,” for many “his ideas are either bankrupt or immanently relevant.”Marxism is associated with criticism of capitalism, but what Marxism can also do is give us a relevant framework of how capitalism functions.

It must first be said that Marxist history need not necessarily inform Marxist or Socialist politics of revolution – although it often does. The focus here is on the Marxist conception of history, not on the politics or desires of Marxists. The key difference is that historians have used Marxist theory to view society without agreeing with Marxist politics, people may refer to themselves in this instance as (lower case m) marxist historians or marxian historians.

A fundamental idea of Marxism is that labour sets humans apart from the animal kingdom. In that we do not hunt and gather what we need but organise society into ordered sections that produce a surplus.  The term surplus means production that exceeds the needs of society – so storing excess food and materials, or the accumulation of capital. For Marx the accumulation of surplus means exploitation, this is because the wage of the labour is kept as low as possible so that the employer may make a surplus. This is part of the dynamics of capitalism, because the employer is encouraged to do this in order to be competitive. So the term exploitation refers not to excessively poor wages or situations, but to the relationship between labour and employer and is a fundamental part of society.

Exploitation is considered an ongoing struggle between those who try to exploit and those who no longer accept the exploitation. This is the infamous class struggle, which is supposed to drive, and unite, society and history. Marxist history does not say that exploitation developed with capitalism, for example it can be applied to the phenomenon called the agricultural revolution – when humans began to farm the land and produce a surplus of food. Those with the power over this surplus become the exploiters and those without power who must offer their labour for a share in this power become the exploited.

So Marxism at its most basic splits society into (at least) two sections, the dominant exploiting class, and the dominated exploited class. As History develops and becomes more complicated, the number of differing relationships and modes of production require further development into the many theories and interpretations of class that exist today. The basic premise of Marxism then, is that society is propelled by a struggle between different opposing interests, and that a key insight into these interests is through a person’s relationship to the way things are produced.

Kit Buchanan