Karl Marx's theory of history
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." This crucial opening to The Communist Manifesto holds the key to understanding Karl Marx's conception of history. Marx outlines history as a two dimensional, "linear" chain of events. A constant progression of class divisions being created and overthrown, one after the other, until the result is the utopian endpoint, otherwise known as communism. Karl Marx, in writing the Communist Manifesto, argued that human history unfolds in a teleological manner; therefore it unfolds according to a distinct series of historical stages, each necessarily following the other. These stages ultimately lead to a given Utopian endpoint, after which there will be no more change, an end to history. Marx thought that these stages can be forecasted, because there are scientific laws, which govern the progress of history. He believed to have discovered these laws and with certainty, predicted the demise of capitalism and the success of communism. According to Marx, the course of human history takes a very specific form, class struggle. The reason for change in the aforementioned historical stages is class animosity. He states, "Hitherto, every form of society
The beginnings of European trade with America and the Far East contributed to the "rapid development" of "the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society"(56). In Marx's words, "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. " That the working class is becoming restless indicates the unfitness of the bourgeoisie to continue as a ruling class. " (56)So Serfs gave rise to burghers who formed the beginnings of the new bourgeois class. "(61) Workers divorced from the products they make, "who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital"(61) cannot but become alienated. These changes are not the results of random social, economic, and political events. According to Marx's account of history, every class is naturally unsound, and predestined for ultimate destruction due to its internal discrepancies. In bourgeois capitalism, however, there is a definite simplification in the breakdown of the classes - people who produce, and who do the work (the proletariat) and those who own the "modes of production" and pay them to work (the bourgeoisie). on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. They will then bring rise to a new class, which has settled the discrepancies of its precursor but retains it own, which will cause its eventual passing. Once they develop a political consciousness and a sense of class cohesion, the working class will overthrow the bourgeois owners who are in fact their masters. " (60)And so, "the weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself" (60), the very means by which the bourgeois secured themselves created the men who represent their opposite: The proletariat, "the modern working class. "The work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman.
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