Theorist and German philosopher. All the intellectual search for Karl Marx aimed at filling the program which it had set at twenty-five years: to produce “the radical criticism of all the existing kind”. This criticism also having to be “practical” (as he will say it in the German ideology), Marx will undertake until his death an intense militant activity.
It is the originality of this philosopher, become a theorist of the economy: a thought constantly polemizes - which wants to be nevertheless scientific level -, a life constantly militant, which nourishes at the same time research more érudites.
Marx philosophizes
Born in 1818 in Trier from a father lawyer (resulting from a family of rabbis, but converted with Protestantism), Karl Marx is the second of a family of eight children.
Registered voter with the Faculty of Law of Berlin, it is subject to the influence of Hegel, then dominant. The “Hegelian young people”, of which Marx forms part, stare at Europe where the freedom proclaimed by the French revolution is a leaven for nationalities and the working classes. After his thesis on the Difference of the philosophy of nature at Démocrite and Epicure (1841), Marx collaborates in the Rhenish Gazette, of which he becomes the editor-in-chief, but who is prohibited by the censure in October 1843. The Marx young person then marries Jenny von Westphalen, an aristocrat in rupture of medium, and comes to live in Paris: he meets there the workmen, the secret societies, the Socialists like Cabet, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and publishes a review, Franco-German Annals there, which seek to establish the link between German philosophy and the French revolutionary practice.
Marx and socialism
Being interested more and more in the political economy, Marx consigns his reflections in fragments published well after his death (Manuscripts of 1844), then writes with Friedrich Engels (whom he attended with the faculty of Berlin, then at the time of the adventure of the Rhenish Gazette) the Holy Family - kind of propaedeutics to the philosophical materialism. While Guizot expels it France, he formulates his philosophy in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) and especially in the German Ideology (1846, but which will be published only in 1932), while collaborating again with Engels. Here the passage to the “practice starts”: the two friends found a network of communist committees of correspondence.
Breaking with Proudhon (Misery of philosophy, 1847), with which it was initially dependant, Marx reorganizes the League of right in League of the Communists, of which the watchword “Proletarians of all the countries, you link!” will be mentioned again in famous Manifeste of the Communist party (1848). After the failure of the revolution in Germany, where it created with Engels the New Rhenish Gazette, Marx exiles itself definitively in London, where it will learn the lesson from the events of 1848 (the Class struggles in France, 1850) and where it will live under very difficult material conditions. To remain, he will write approximately 500 articles between 1851 and 1862, in British and American newspapers.
Marx economist
In 1859, it completes the Contribution to the criticism of the political economy and publishes in 1867 the first volume of the Capital. Meanwhile, it took part in the foundation of the International association of the workers, which will ramify everywhere in Europe. In 1871, the Civil war in France analyzes the failure of the Commune, “first working State” of the history. Fighting as well against the French reformists, the disciples of Bakounine or the influence in Germany de Ferdinand Lassalle (Critical of the program of Gotha, 1875), Marx carries out face the militancy and the drafting of the Capital (for which he studies, inter alia, mathematics, physiology and astronomy). After having lost his wife and her oldest daughter, he dies on on March 14th, 1883, under miserable conditions and in the middle of an immense and unfinished labor. At the time of its burial in London, with the cemetery of Highgate, Engels affirms: “Its name and its work will live in the centuries.”
The work of Marx
One would vainly seek a philosophical system at Marx, since itself fought the great systems of its time under a criticism of the “ideologies”, and that after 1845 it does not devote any more his time that to journalism, the historical analysis and, especially, with the political economy.
Marx philosophizes of the action
This encyclopedic spirit however never forgot its doctorate on Démocrite and Epicure, and its first original intellectual period consists of a philosophical criticism of philosophy. What motivates the Marx young person very quickly, it is the search for a unit between the thought and the action, because it is persuaded that all human reality expresses this unit; in a formulation which still must in Hegel, he writes in the Rhenish Gazette: “The same spirit which builds the philosophical systems in the brain of the philosophers builds the railroads with the hands of the workmen.” But, instead of the unit of the same “spirit”, he is convinced that another logic, of standard materialist, is concerned: it makes depend art, philosophy, the right, of socio-economic structures, that Marx will baptize “reports of production” and “productive forces”. The material life of the men, at a given stage of their historical development, conditions, and by there explains, their cultural life.
Marx thinker of social reality
In the German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach, this conviction involves the final abandonment of the Hegelian idealism, and even of the critical materialist of the religion such as Feuerbach had led. The philosophical materialism is, until now, based on an abstract design of the man like autonomous individual: “But the gasoline of the man is not an abstraction inherent in the isolated individual. In its reality, it is the whole of the social reports.” The concepts, the values, the political order must thus always be attached to social reports which they “represent” or “express” in a more or less buckled way. The famous question of the truth, treated by the philosophers, “is not a theoretical question, but a practical matter”. In other words, neither the metaphysical interrogation on the truth nor the theoretical assertion of the truth of a proposal are legitimate in themselves: “It is in practice that it is necessary that the man proves the truth, i.e. reality, and power of its thought, in this world and for our time.”
Marx and the philosophical tradition
That by its inscription in social reality the thought must be “powerful”, here is a requirement in rupture with the philosophical tradition. But could it still be a question of philosophy? Wasn't the criterion of the practical effectiveness likely to replace for the truth (in the order of knowledge) and justice (in the order of morality)? These questions appear to be essential since Marx closes the Theses by the famous assertion: “The philosophers did nothing but interpret the world in various ways, which imports is to transform it.” To tell the truth, Marx already thinks of having answered the asked questions, because he refutes universal philosophers and he accommodates some another, working in reality present and guaranteeing in the history an irrecusable future.
Marx and proletariat
If each philosopher had his something to lean on archimédien (the Ideas of Plato, the cogito at Descartes, the Spirit at Hegel), Marx, from this point of view, does not make exception: the proletariat is at the same time the historical subject and the agent of the “practical-critical” activity whose philosopher must be made the interpreter.
How a class of the company can claim to incarnate the universal one (Allgemeine)? Until now, each class which dominated the company “was obliged to give to its thoughts the form of the universality, to represent them as being the only reasonable ones, only the universally valid ones”. Contrary, the proletariat, when he becomes revolutionist, accelerates the moment when it will not be necessary any more “to represent an private interest as being the general interest or to represent the Universal one like dominating”, because the proletariat defends the interests of all humanity and not of an egoistic fraction.
There is here the new lever (some will say: the “takeover by force”) by which Marx reverses idealistic philosophies: no theoretical universality without practical universality, “universal concrete” interpreted way materialist. This figure of the “critical” concept to realize in practice is called Communism, and its inseparable attribute internationalism. “Proletarian of all the countries, you link! ”: the Communist Manifesto Formula One an obviously political watchword (materialized in 1864 by the International one, whose Marx writes the text founder), but which, at Karl Marx, finds his roots in the dispute of the philosophical abstraction undertaken in 1845.
Marx and the State
From this point of view, the proletariat thus becomes the key, installed in the “infrastructure” of the company, which allows to relativize the ideological “superstructures”, to which belonged philosophy. If the “dominant” thoughts are only the thoughts of the dominant class, it can only be the same for the State, instrument forged for legitimation and repression - including in its democratic and constitutional form. The State is not the figure of universal and the holder of the general interest, as still Hegel defined it, but a work of the absolutism improved by the middle-class, as shows it particularly the French experiment. Sometimes it can appear to become emancipated of all the classes of the company, but it is only illusion (18 brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). And in front of the epopee of the Commune - at the same time tragic and fertilizes -, Marx will write that the proletariat must break the “machine of State”, instead of seizing some: in this thought, the democracy is struck of discredit - but not without ambiguities, since by the “association” of the producers (Critical of the program of Gotha) it is a question of finding a form of democracy, beyond the right and the State. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” constitutes the political regime of the transition towards the classless society, transition which passes by the abolition of the State at the end one period when this last organizes the production and deals with various social tasks.
The “human rights” stated by the French revolution are disqualified in the same way: while bringing back the man to the row of “citizen of the company civil-middle-class woman”, they are useful, practically, the domination of the capitalist and the property owner.
Marx and middle-class
Convinced that the knowledge of the infrastructures is essential to the revolutionary conscience, Marx devotes tens of years to the drafting of the Capital: this work must found the science of the inexorable needs for capitalism, to clarify the conditions of its genesis, its maturity and its collapse. It is a question of drawing aside any Utopia or any prophecy to describe an objective need that knowledge does nothing but hasten. To read the postface of the German 2nd edition of the Capital (1873), it is seen well that the Marx philosopher moulted, but did not disappear. As in the German Ideology, the claim with the universality of the “middle-class” theorists is scoffed: “The political economy can remain a science only provided that the class struggle remains latent or appears only by isolated phenomena.” If ever a crisis appears, “it is not a question any more of knowing if such or such theorem is true, but if he is well or badly sounding, pleasant or not with the police force, useful or harmful with the capital”.
On the other hand - and as in 1845 -, Marx does not doubt to carry, by science, the interests of a class: “As such a criticism a class represents, it can represent only that whose historical mission is to revolutionize the capitalist mode of production, and, finally, to abolish the classes.” It is well the former “practical-critical” philosopher who speaks here, and who is made proud of the echo that on this date it meets everywhere in Europe. He recalls besides that he studied Hegel, that he took again dialectical logic of it, “to give it on his feet” (or, another translation, to extract “the rational core from it”). By the dialectical one and the materialism, the thought becomes “powerful”, Marx of 1873 confirms: “In the positive design of the existing things, it includes at the same time the intelligence of their fatal negation, of their destruction necessary; (...) it is primarily critical and revolutionary.”
De Marx with the Marxism
The unit of the thought of Marx is thus not about the system, but it resides in this certainty: for little that the theorist systematizes the social movement which it has under the eyes, it is in truth, and escapes the “ideology”. As the philosopher of 1843 said it: “We bring to the world the principles which the world itself developed in its center. We show him only why it fights, in a precise way, and the conscience of itself is a thing which it will have to acquire.” As it is seen, this certainty to say the historical need - against romantic or utopian socialisms of the time - could lead to dogmatism; could this will, which wants to be not voluntarist, to reconcile the being and the duty-being (as Marx writes it in a letter with his/her father) criticize itself while criticizing the ideologies?
It is Marx still who will write - in answer to a questionnaire posed by his/her daughters - that its preferred currency was: “Doubt of all.” Could it show the example, on this point? And especially, was he heard? It was improbable that doctrines of the historical need (and it is well what Marx founded) could really leave room to the methodical doubt.
MarxismThe “Marxism”, which collects the heritage of the “scientific socialism” of Karl Marx, knows divergent interpretations. Marx wanted to be itself foreign with the systematic mind, whereas the Marxists often take up its political ideas, philosophical and economic in a dogmatic spirit. The Marxism, which was one of the principal ideologies of the XX E century, was used as justification as well with democratic socialist movements as with totalitarian dictatorships.
Marxism and political theory
Like his/her friend notes it and collaborator Friedrich Engels, Marx builds her thought starting from three intellectual influences: the German philosophy of Hegel, political economy of the English traditional school and French socialist ideas. He will criticize them however all also.
Marxism and materialism
Of his Master in philosophy, Marx retains a design adding up of historical unfolding according to a dialectical principle: the one time antagonisms worsen until being solved in a crisis. Thus progresses the history, and the life itself.
But Marx very early criticizes the idealistic thought of Hegel for his abstraction and his justification of the political status quo. He is inspired then by the analysis materialist and humanistic of Ludwig Feuerbach denouncing the religion like an alienation; the man strips himself of his gasoline and his qualities to lend them to God. Marx will widen the idea of alienation to the entire cultural field, carrying illusions which plug the man on the reality of the life, on the forces of oppression to work in the company, but also on its capacities of action. The “superstructure” of the company - the religion, art, ideas, human rights and of the citizen themselves - tightens, according to him, to justify its “infrastructure” - the economy, reality. But this materialism is however not coarse: if the evolution of the superstructure is ordered by that of the infrastructure, that does not mean that one is reduced to different or that their reports obey a simple and always unilateral determinism. Marx never eludes the complexity of the history.
Class consciousness in the Marxism
In most its writings, it presents a strict order in the succession of the great historical stages, each one being characterized by a “mode of production” dominating: primitive Communism, slave system, feudalism, capitalism. Communism, stage ultimate of this evolution, corresponds to the entry in one radically new era, breaking with the process of exploitation of the man by the man. To affirm it, Marx is based on the idea that the proletarians undergo a so painful situation in the capitalist company that they lose of it any illusion, nationalist, morals or nun. They open then with a “class consciousness” which joins again with the action and reality. This Messianic component of its thought will be a powerful leaven of revolutionary mobilization. The theoretical search for Marx will then primarily under investigation devote economic capitalism.
Revolutionary Marxism
Faithful to his philosophical conviction of a bond necessary between the theory and the practice, Marx is never diverted political action. Also its criticisms and its parties taken are far from being purely intellectual. Perspicacious observer of the history which is played under its eyes, it learns the lessons continuously from them. The class struggles, the revolutions and the wars of the XIXe European century direct its thought in a decisive way.
Marxism, international movement
While taking as a starting point their Communism, Marx criticizes the utopian ideas and the political lack of effectiveness of the French Socialists (Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Etienne Cabet and, especially, Proudhon). It writes Proclamation of the Communist party (1848) for the first international organized labor, the League of the Communists. It is significant that, under its influence and that of Engels, this one adopts, instead of its first currency “All the men are brothers”, the watchword “Proletarians of all the countries, you link!”. Partisan of a revolutionary engagement, Marx underlines also the need for the internationalization of the working class, with equal of the extension of the capitalist system. The labor movement is organized soon in an International association of the workers (A), or International Anger, who gathers very diverse political doctrines: French proudhoniens, anarchistic, British liberals and trade unionists (trade-unionistic). Marx plays upon the departure a decisive role while taking part in his direction and by publishing texts teaching and engaged in order to clarify the class consciousness of the proletarians according to the ideas of the “scientific socialism”.
Dictatorship of the proletariat
Under the blow of the failure of the revolution of 1848, Marx adopts the idea of “dictatorship of the proletariat”. He indeed hardens his criticism of the middle-class democratic republic and his machine of bureaucratic and military State, which he sees to incarnate in the Bonapartism (18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). Marx will greet in the Commune of Paris of 1871 the first experiment of dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the same spirit, it will dispute in 1875 the program of the German social democrat party, result of a fusion of the partisans of Marx and those of Ferdinand Lassalle. The latter indeed persist in hoping for a socialist intervention of the Prussian State and preaching a peaceful passage to Communism. Marx specifies on this occasion his notion of dictatorship of the proletariat by distinguishing two stages necessary. During the first, socialism, reigns the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, and the productive forces are developed according to the formula “with each one according to its work”. The state of abundance which this growth causes allows the advent of the second stage, the Communism, which sees the removal of the classes and the State, and into practice puts the formula “at each one according to its needs”.
The interpretation of the events of the Commune by Marx causes the rejection of the trade-unionistic British, who leave HAS it. Marx and Engels at that time underline the utility of a structured and unified organization Socialists. They are opposed to the anarchists, directed by Bakounine, who will be excluded from International in 1872. The Marxism consequently becomes the prevalent ideology, but the polemic also continues in its center.
The Marxism reformist
With the development of industrialization, the socialist movement, assisted by the rise of the trade unions, knows a great expansion in the last quarter of the XIX E century, particularly in Germany. IIe Internationale is founded in 1889 under the aegis of French working Parti of Jules Guesde. Itself Marxist, this one however asserts the primacy of the parliamentary action. Progress of the democracy and the relative improvement of the working condition then let foresee the possibility of a peaceful passage to socialism by the legal victory of a powerful party of mass. German social democracy is then the theater of a debate between Marxist “revisionists”, holding of orthodoxe reformism, and Marxists - Eduard Bernstein opposes to Karl Kautsky. But this controversy, as those which precede it, concerns the traditional political polemic.
Marxism, Communism and socialism
Leninist doctrines, then the practical policy of the party Bolshevik, which seizes the power in Russia at the time of the revolution of 1917, involve an irremediable rupture in the Marxist movement.
Marxism-Leninism
Lénine proclaims that the Russian labor movement is the “avant-garde of the world proletariat”. Founded in 1919, the International Communist (or Comintern, in Russian), still named IIIe International, is born from this will to create around the Communist party of Russia a strongly centralized union of the various national Communist parties. The latter appear after a series of scissions within the socialist parties and social democrats. They will apply, according to the model Bolshevik, a logic of purification of any dissidence. The dialog with the other socialist currents, even Marxist, is consequently impossible. In France, with the congress of Turns of 1920, Léon Blum refuses, with a minority of militants, the design of the party proposed by the 21 admission requirements in the International Communist. The cut between the Communists of IIIe International and the other parties Marxist is dramatically illustrated by their refusal to be combined vis-a-vis the rise of Fascism in Italy, then vis-a-vis that of the Nazism in Germany. Some political bringings together will occur however thereafter, at the time of the “popular fronts”.
Marxism and socialist parties
A socialist international movement is reconstituted after the Second world war. It accepts the Marxism like a socialist conviction among others, but it excludes Communism, “incompatible with the critical spirit of the Marxism” (congress of Frankfurt, 1951). The junction of the Marxism and the labor movement did not occur everywhere, nor always with the same intensity. If it is very strong in Germany to the First World War, then again after 1920, social democrats and Communists will undergo then the mortal blows of the Nazism; then German social democracy will give up into 1959 the formal references to the Marxism. In Great Britain, the Marxism was never the ideology but of small groups, although the labor movement developed with force thanks to the trade unionism reformist. Particularly open to the Marxist theses, France knew a Communist party and a socialist party, both very important.
Critics of the political Marxism
The political Marxism multiplied the paradoxes: doctrines of release announcing the deterioration of the State after the revolution, it became the dogma of dictatorial modes. Also one showed the thought of Marx to offer an easy justification of any political violence, perpetrated in the name of supposed historical laws. Turning over the theory of the ideological alienation of Marx against the Marxism itself, one as noticed as it raised a political and doctrinal mobilization total, worthy by its width of a great secular religion.
Many intellectuals however regarded the work of Marx as a decisive rupture in the tradition, a stage founder of modernity. They integrated it and prolonged in their vision and their questioning of the world, which they are Christian, existentialist (Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of the dialectical reason, 1965), structuralist (Louis Althusser, Lire the Capital, 1966), nondogmatic psychoanalysts (Wilhelm Reich) or Marxists (the school of Frankfurt and Herbert Marcuse).
Marxism and economic theory
The philosopher's stone of Marx, the Capital, aims to base the socialism and the need for its advent on a scientific analysis. This “criticism of the political economy”, work subtitles, is based partly on the theories of the British economists, and especially David Ricardo. But Marx opposes vigorously their conclusions, in conformity, according to him, with the middle-class ideology, for which the capitalist system is natural. He replaces, on the contrary, this one within the framework of a design materialist of the history: the passage to the capitalist economic order was done in violence, by the expropriation of the peasants and colonial plundering in particular. The means of production were thus extorted from the producers: the proletarians “are obliged to be sold piece per piece such goods”. Marx considers that the exploitation of the labor force by the capital constitutes the engine even capitalism, and he intends to provide a rigorous demonstration of it.
The Capital attempts to bore what Marx calls the “secrecies” of the capitalist system. The principal secrecy which it is a question of revealing is the origin of the profit: “Owing to the fact that all the parts of the capital, without distinction, seem the source of the surplus of value (profit), the capitalist reports are completely darkened.”
Goods and overproduction
The richness of the capitalist company comes from a gigantic accumulation of goods. The goods are not only one simple object. It is its value and the possibility of exchanging it which makes of an object goods. Whereas before one produced objects to make use to them objects of it had a practical value -, the capitalists started to produce objects to sell them, conferring an exchange value to them which ended up supplanting the practical value. It is the alienation of the practical value: the objects are misused, being treated by the capitalists like “values”. This tendency which the practical value has the exchange value to gum finds in the overproduction. The capitalistic production leads indeed periodically to a surplus accumulation of goods, whose consequences are the price collapse and the economic crisis.
The labor force like goods
The reasoning of Marx rests then on the idea that the labor force is goods in the capitalist economy. It is bought, and its price, the wages, is negotiated on the market according to the generalized principle of the exchange value. This one, as for all other produced, is determined by the working time socially necessary to the production of the good. The measurement of the wages corresponds thus to the renewal and maintenance costs of the labor force, being equivalent strictly to that of the material subsistence of the worker and his children, who will replace it.
The overproduction of these specific goods that is the labor force exists it too. According to the cycles, during the crisis periods, one attends the development of a “industrial reserve army” which corresponds to the unemployed of the industrialized countries, but who also extended to the colonial market, that Marx constantly takes into account in his analysis.
Constant and variable capital capital
To discover the hidden origin of the surplus, i.e. profit, Marx makes a distinction become traditional between constant and variable capital capital.
The constant capital, they are the means of production, that is to say the means and materials of work (the factory, machines and raw materials necessary to the manufacture of the goods). The variable capital is made up, him, by the labor force (that which the worker sells). However the workman adds value by his work, for example the blacksmith while forging, and it is precisely this work (variable capital) which converts iron and the anvil (constant capital) into “formative elements of a product”. This working time, which is necessary, without which goods cannot be manufactured, account in the product obtained. The amount of the variable capital is thus equal to the wages perceived by the workers. But Marx affirms that an appreciation results from the use of the variable capital, i.e. workmen. Indeed, the means of production do not add to the product more value than they of “do not materialize” (an end product which contains one kilo of iron materializes only the value of this kilo of iron, without more). On the other hand, the work of the workman who implemented iron creates products of value higher than his clean, its labor force: the workman thus added appreciation.
Exploitation and wage-earning
The paid working time is equal to that which requires the production of the goods necessary for the survival of the workman and its reproduction, which is not other than the childbirth. But the workman works more than these bare essential and part of work remains not paid: the worker receives, in the form of wages, a value lower than that which it produced. This “surtravail” (difference between wages and produced value) provides to the capitalist a “overvalue” (according to the literal translation of German Mehrwert), or appreciation.
By identifying the appreciation with the profit, Marx denounces wage-earning like a form of exploitation, and it saps at the base all the justifications which the capitalists of their continuation of the profit give.
Thus, the introduction of the concept of appreciation is fundamental. Indeed, “for the capitalist, the cost of the goods understands only the part of the materialized work which it paid. The surtravail contained in the goods does not cost anything to the capitalist, although it costs work to the workman (...). The made capitalist of the profit because it can sell something which it did not pay. The appreciation, or the profit, it is precisely this surplus of the value of the goods on its production costs, i.e. the surplus of the total work contained in the goods on the paid work which it contains.” Marx makes a historical background, which condenses its goals and shows its method: “In fact, the historical starting point, it is the rate of profit. The appreciation and the rate of appreciation are, relatively, the element invisible, but essential, that it is necessary to seek, while the rate of profit and, therefore, the appreciation in the form of profit appear on the surface of the phenomenon.” Thus, numerically, the profit is equal to the appreciation. But the rate of profit (which thus measures the surplus, reported to the total capital) is different from the rate of appreciation (which measures this same surplus, but reported to only variable capital); moreover, the concept of profit masks the way in which the surplus is obtained.
Exceeding a simple moral argument, Marx then undertakes to show that capitalism court with his loss while following laws of evolution necessary, themselves resulting from inherent contradictions to this mode of production.
Contradictions of capitalism
The research of the profit involves a competition exacerbated between the capitalists on the market; they are unceasingly constrained to improve their profitability to maintain their company. They thus endeavor to increase the rate of the appreciation. But this one is not indefinitely extensible. The reduction in the wages knows a lower limit, the minimum necessary to the survival of the workman, and the increase in the work hours also has a physiological limit. Only possible way with the development of capitalism, a third solution remains: to increase the labor productivity. The capitalists must then constantly modernize and multiply their means of production. This process involves a series of consequences.
Marxism and impoverishment
As of book I of the Capital, Marx underlines a fundamental contradiction: the workers, creators of the richness, are definitively reduced under a miserable condition. He supports that “whatever the wage rate, high or low, the condition of the worker must worsen as the capital accumulates”.
The increase in the productivity involves that of the appreciation indeed, and the workers undergo a more serious exploitation. Marx does not think however that the real wages must constantly drop. He insists on the fact that part of the working class is unceasingly reduced to misery by unemployment. The constant progress of the techniques of production causes to decrease the demand for labor continuously. The mass of the unemployed which results from it makes it possible to the capitalists to maintain the wages on a level relatively low.
Marxism and concentration
Industry must invest always more capital in the machines, and only the companies which increase unceasingly resist the consecutive increase in their expenses. Increasingly rich, the capitalists are done less and less many.
This process of concentration of the capital between the hands of some has as a corollary a generalization of the proletarian condition. The middle-classes, the craftsmen in particular, tend to disappear. The structure of the company is thus increasingly dichotomic. Moreover, the division of the labor, pushed to the extreme in a parcelling out of the tasks in modern industry, implies an increased socialization of the men, who depend in a narrower way from/to each other, and, all together, of the production of the whole company. But the means of this production are the private property of a small minority the purpose of which is not to satisfy the needs for the greatest number.
Also Marx arrives it at this famous conclusion: “The monopoly of the capital becomes an obstacle for the mode of production which grew and thrived with him. The socialization of work and the centralization of its material springs arrive at a point where they cannot hold any more in their capitalist envelope. This envelope breaks in glares. The expropriating ones are in their turn expropriated.”
The trend fall of the rate of profit
“The progressive increase in the constant capital compared to the variable capital must necessarily have for effect a gradual fall of the general rate of profit, the rate of appreciation, or degree of exploitation of work by the capital, remaining the same one. However, it appeared - and it is a law of the capitalist mode of production - that as this one develops, it occurs a relative reduction in the variable capital compared to the constant capital, therefore with the total capital put moving. In other words, the same number of workmen - same quantity of labor force - made available by a variable capital of a given value, in consequence of the development of the methods of production suitable for the capitalistic production, will put moving, will transform and consume in a productive way, in same time, an always increasing quantity of means of work, machines, of fixed assets of any kind, raw materials and auxiliaries - in short, a constant capital of an unceasingly increasing value.”
It is the fundamental law of the fall of the rate of profit, which illustrates the power of the sociological analysis of Marx: the sum of the individual initiatives (here, the rise in the appreciation by the capitalists) produced a fall of the rate of profit, consequence opposed so that the individuals wish.
The economists envisaged the entry of capitalism in a stationary state, but they did not deduce any therefore the imminence from a social crisis able to reverse the system. For Marx, on the contrary, faithful to a dialectical interpretation of becoming economic and historical, the whole of the contradictory tendencies of the modern mode of production was to lead ineluctably to a final crisis, the revolution, only possibility of operating the redistribution of the productive forces in a qualitatively different social state: socialism.
Marxism in comparison with the history
The Marxists took conscience very early owing to the fact that capitalism, evolving to new forms, did not show any sign of collapse under the weight of its economic contradictions. They reacted then by economic interpretations and theories violently opposite the ones to the others.
Marxism, fixed determinism or reformism
As of the end of the XIX E century, the polemic emerges thus to Germany, within Marxist social democracy. To holding of an evolution slower than envisaged capitalism are opposed the critical spirits, or opportunist, which wish to undertake the analysis of the errors of Marx.
Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) intends to remain faithful to the letter of the scientific theory of Marx. But one can also interpret his attitude as a pretext with the political passivity - the historical need has only to make our action - or like a blindness in front of historical realities. In the right line of such a dogmatism, the Communist parties will support, until in the years 1950, a law of absolute depauperation of the proletariat, in spite of the obviousness of an increase in the standard of living of the workmen in the most developed countries.
Social democrat also, Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) inaugurates a criticism of the economic theory of Marx: this one would have underestimated the capacities of adaptation of the industrial society. Bernstein supports the assumption of a self-regulation of the capitalism, which escapes the crises grace thus, inter alia, with the international extension of the market, the faster circulation of the goods and the appearance of the great trusts. As calling in question the idea of an increasing cut of the company in two classes only, middle-class and proletariat, Bernstein, very quickly shown of “revisionism”, opens prospects plus reformists as revolutionists.
Revisited Marxism
The imperialism increasingly more violent of the capitalist companies raises new questions at the time of the First World War. The thesis of Rosa Luxemburg of a continuation of the original expropriTation of capitalism in the colonized countries of the third world in is a brilliant example.
The interpretation of Lénine, however, dominates, strong of the political voluntarism of this chief of the Russian revolution. According to him, the imperialism is the “supreme stage of capitalism” and impoverishment continues in the underdeveloped countries exploited by the industrialized nations. Part of the proletarians of the rich countries profit from this source of profit, give up the class struggle and adopt nationalism. Lénine wants to thus found its charge of the parties of IIe Internationale, which supported the defense policies main road of their countries during the war.
The Leninist doctrines also make it possible to justify the triumph of Communism in primarily rural countries like Russia then China, which is at first sight in total contradiction with the analysis historical and scientific of Marx, according to which industrial capitalism is a phase necessary.