Recently, more and more people around the world are interested in Marxism. The system of views on society, politics and economics developed by Marx, Engels and Lenin certainly contains some contradictions. But at the same time, it is distinguished by sufficient harmony and logical justification.
Three sources of Marxism
Marxism is a system of socio-political, economic and philosophical views, first set forth by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later developed by Vladimir Lenin. Classical Marxism is a scientific theory about the revolutionary transformation of social reality, about the objective laws of the development of society.
Marx's theory did not arise out of nowhere. The sources of Marxism were classical German philosophy, English political economy, and French utopian socialism. Taking from these currents all the most valuable, Marx and his closest friend and comrade-in-arms Engels were able to create a doctrine, the consistency and completeness of which even ardent opponents of Marxism recognize. Marxism combines the materialist understanding of society and nature with the revolutionary theory of scientific communism.
Philosophy of Marxism
Marx's views were formed under the influence of the materialist philosophy of Feuerbach and the idealistic logic of Hegel. The founder of the new theory managed to overcome the limitations of Feuerbach's views, his excessive contemplation and underestimation of the importance of political struggle. In addition, Marx reacted negatively to the metaphysical views of Feuerbach, who did not recognize the development of the world.
To the materialist understanding of nature and society, Marx added Hegel's dialectical method, clearing it of the idealistic husk. Gradually, the contours of a new direction in philosophy, called dialectical materialism, took shape.
Dialectics Marx and Engels subsequently extended to history and other social sciences.
In Marxism, the question of the relationship between thinking and being is resolved unambiguously from a materialist standpoint. In other words, being and matter are primary, and consciousness and thinking are only a function of matter organized in a special way, which is at the highest stage of its development. The philosophy of Marxism denies the existence of a higher divine essence, no matter what dress idealists may dress it in.
The political economy of Marxism
Marx's main work, Capital, is devoted to economic issues. In this essay, the author creatively applied the dialectical method and the materialist concept of the historical process to the study of the capitalist mode of production. Having discovered the laws of development of a society based on capital, Marx convincingly proved that the collapse of capitalist society and its replacement by communism is inevitable and an objective necessity.
Marx studied in detail the basic economic concepts and phenomena inherent in the capitalist mode of production, including the concepts of commodity, money, exchange, rent, capital, surplus value. Such an in-depth analysis allowed Marx to draw a number of conclusions that are valuable not only for those who are attracted by the ideas of building a classless society, but also for modern entrepreneurs, many of whom are learning to manage their capital using Marx's book as a guide.
The doctrine of socialism
Marx and Engels in their works carried out a detailed analysis of social relations characteristic of the middle of the 19th century, and substantiated the inevitability of the death of the capitalist mode of production and the replacement of capitalism with a more progressive social system - communism. The first phase of a communist society is socialism. This is an immature, incomplete communism, which in many ways contains some of the ugly features of the previous system. But socialism is an inevitable stage in the development of society.
The founders of Marxism were among the first to point out a social force that should become the gravedigger of the bourgeois system. This is the proletariat, wage workers who do not have any means of production and are forced to sell their ability to work by being hired to work for the capitalists.
By virtue of its special position in production, the proletariat becomes a revolutionary class around which all the other progressive forces of society unite.
The central position of the revolutionary theory of Marxism is the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat, through which the working class retains its power and dictates political will to the exploiting classes. Under the leadership of the proletariat, the working people are able to build a new society in which there will be no place for class oppression. The ultimate goal of Marxism is to build communism, a classless society based on the principles of social justice.
