MARXIST THEORY

By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

MARXISM

Represents an economic and socio-political movement that contains within it a political ideology for how to change and improve society by implementing socialism. The theory itself originally developed in the early 19th century by two German emigrants Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

KARL MARX (1818-1883)

Karl Marx best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary communist, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland.Studied law in Bonn and BerlinKarl Marx also published various books during his lifetime with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867-1894) many of which were co-written with his friend, the fellow German revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels.

FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820-1895)

German social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher,and father of communist theory, alongside Karl Marx.Friedrich, the eldest son of a successful German industrialist,was born in Barmen in 1820. As a young man his father sent him to England to help manage his cotton-factory inManchester.In 1844 Engels began contributing to a radical journal called Franco-German Annals that was being editedby Karl Marx in Paris, later Engels and Marx becameclose friends.Engels shared Marx’s views on capitalism andThey decided to work together.

MARXISM

Marxist analysis leads to the conclusion that capitalism,the currently dominant form of economic management,leads to the oppression of the proletariat, who not only make up themajority of the world’s population but who also spend their lives workingfor the benefit of the bourgeoisie, or wealthy ruling class in society.

THEORETICAL WORKSThe Communist Manifesto

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Das Capital

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

Grundrisse

The German ideology

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Theses on Feuerbach

MARXIST ECONOMIC STATEMENTS

*Scientific socialism (an economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production any allocation of resources).*Economic determinism (the belief that economic organization of a society determines the nature of all other aspects of its life).*Labor power and law value (“labor” refers to the actual activityor effort of producing goods or services, according to Marxuse-values).

MARXIST ECONOMIC STATEMENTS

Means of production – a physical, non-human inputs used in production – the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth – along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital.

Mode of production refers to a specific combination

1) Productive forces (human labor power and the means of production including tools, equipment, building and technologies, materials, improved land).

2) Social and technical relations of production including property, power and control relations governing society’s productive asserts, often codified in law, cooperative work relations and forms of association, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes.

*Surplus labor and surplus value

*Transformation

M A R X I S T T H E O R Y : C O M M U N I S T R E G I M E S I N T H E 2 0 T H C E N T U R Y

Present communist states:

*China *Cuba

*Laos *Vietnam

Elected communist parties by country:

*Cyprus *Nepal

*Moldova * Venezuela

FORMERLY COMMUNIST COUNTRIES

Afghanistan Chechoslovakia Romania

Albania Hungary Somalia

Angola East Germany South Yemen

Benin Ethiopia Soviet Union

Bulgaria Mongolia Yugoslavia

Cambodia Mozambique

Congo Poland

THE R ESULT OF MARXIS T ’S COM MUN IS M

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