COURSE:

SKSJ1023 PENGANTAR TEORI POLITIK

SEMESTER 1 SESI 2021/2022
SET 1

TITLE:
HURAIKAN ELEMEN-ELEMEN MARXISME.

LECTURER:
DR. SHARIFAH NURSYAHIDAH BINTI SYED ANNUAR

PREPARED BY:
CHAN YEW JOE (A189386)
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS................................................................................................i

1.0 INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................1

2.0 THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX.......................................................................2

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM................................................................................2

CLASS STRUGGLE..................................................................................................3

ALIENATION............................................................................................................4

THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ENGELS.....................................................................4

3.0 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARXISM..................................................................6

RUSSIAN AND SOVIET MARXISM......................................................................6

VARIANTS OF MARXISM......................................................................................9

WESTERN MARXISM.............................................................................................9

4.0 TODAY’S MARXISM...........................................................................................11

5.0 CONCLUSION......................................................................................................13

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................I

i
1.0 INTRODUCTION
The term Marxism is used in several different ways. Since the first use of the word
Marxism in 1880i, the meaning of Marxism has changes throughout the history until
today. Geuss (2013) in his lecture has talks about the nature of Marxism and the
approaches to study Marxism. There are genrally five distinct but related approach to
study Marxism. First is to take Karl Marx as an intellectual and look at his philosophy
as empirical theory and analyse how the view of Marx propounded. Second, one can
focus on the most plausible central view of Marxism and do a rationally
reconstruction of it. The third way of studying Marxism is to look at it from Marx as a
initiating of a tradition way of thoughts. Along this culmination line of thoughts, how
did Marxism develops until today. Forth is a study of various Marxism instead of a
mainline of Marxism. The last approach to study Marxism is the application of the
way of thinking the world as the inherent of Marxism. In short, it means to look at
what actually happen, look at the application of Marxism theory.
The nature, the development, and the apporoach of Marxism introduce a few
issue to this work. Marxism has this long line of history, ongoing for 150 years,
numerous of the disciples of Karl Marx has interpreted Marxism in their unique way.
To select the significant one and put into a short article, may risk omit certain other
development of Marxism that are equally significant. According to the approaches of
study, selection for the material on Marxism that matches the specific approaches of
study is of importance. For example, the sources that study variant of Marxism has
little to offer for the rational reconstruction of Marx’s central idea as an approach to
study Marxism. The declaration of approach pair with the following introduction of
section can help attune reader focus when reading the respecticve section.
In 2.0, a few key elements of Marxism that is originate from Karl Marx is
being discussed. It can be read as a brief rational reconstruction of Marx’s idea. In 3.0,
a brief overview of the development will be touch upon. Over here, the reader will
witness how in the development of Marxism, it has changed and doesn’t stay the same
as the doctrine written by Karl Marx 150 years ago. This is the approach to study the
variant of Marxism. With the end of the cold war, the collapse of communism, and the
global triumph of 'free market' capitalism, people have come to dismiss the ideas of
Marx and his numerous disciples as irrelevant. This question will be remained open
and attempt to answer it in 4.0 to probe the relevancy of Marxism. Marx often being
seen as a prophet that predict the progress of society. Some of his predictions, after
1
underwent the “great experiment” and modern research and analysis, has turn out to
be plainly false. An overlook of what claims no longer holds is part of the analysis in
4.0. This section resembles the last approach as suggested by Geuss (2013) as an
application of Marxism.

2.0 THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Regardless of whether we make a deliberate choice or not, evolution will happen, and
new civilization will be built. But evolution does not guarantee progress. Humankind
may be left out of the evolutionary process altogether. ii There is a need to make
intelligent choice based on the understanding of how evolution works. This
understanding could be obtained either from scientific understanding, the goals of the
human beings, or the law of the universe. Like Darwin’s theory of how biological
evolution take place, Marx has offered the theory of how historical evolution taken
place.
The dialectical materialism and historical materialism by Marx are inherent
from Wilhelm Hegel.iii Hegel thinks that idea develop in the form of dialectic. It meant
an idea starts off with what he called thesis, meet with its opposition idea called
antithesis, and lastly come out with synthesis that is the product of both contradict
idea. Philosophy has this open question of whether everything is cause by idea or by
material. The former ideology is called idealism and the latter is materialism. Hegel
adopt dialectic mode of thinking but take idealism as his starting point. Hegel take the
idealism point of view where: it is the idea that forms first, then it influences the
society according to it. This is what Hegel thinks of as how history progress.
Marx adopts the same dialectical mode of thinking and develop his further
propositions. What makes both idea different is that Marx’s starting point is of
materialism. Marx holds the idea of materialism and advocates that history progress
with the material that produce. This led to the historical materialism in Marxism,
whereby the history progress is initiated by material.
Human has primary needs. And to fulfill the needs, human develop tools and
utilize material to overcome the obstacles they faced. Each time the tools evolve or
technology advance, the production process changes and become more productive.
Following that, the production process makes social relation adapt to it. In Marx’s
terms, the tools and material are the means of production, which is part of the base,
2
e.g., machines, factories, land, raw materials etc. The social relation is superstructure.
It consists of everything not to do with production, e.g., education, family, mass
media, religion, politics etc. Marx proposed that history is a process of base shaping
the superstructure and the superstructure maintains and legitimate the base. “The
hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with
industrial capitalist”.iv With the “continual movement of growth in productive forces,
of destruction in social relation, of formation in ideas,” the history evolves.
CLASS STRUGGLE
The dialectic nature of history has produced what Marx called as class struggle.
According to Marx, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles”.v Marx declares that he did not discover the existence of classes or class
struggle in his letter to Joseph Weydemeyer. However, he did prove that the existence
of classes is due to the development of production, that class struggle will inevitably
instill a sense of class consciousness in proletariat and ready to overturn capitalism to
form a classless society. Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), a Marxist theorist and a leader of
the German Social Democratic Party, took up the concept of class where Marx left off
in the last chapter of Volume III of Capital and reconstruct his thoughts, come out
with the following conclusion. “The concept of class has a polarized character, i.e., a
class exists only in opposition to another class…a society can only be classless or
composed of at least two hostile classes.”vi A collectivity become a class when its
members’ revenue comes from the same source and be in a state of conflict with
another class over the distribution of revenue. Another “essential condition of the
existence of a class” wrote Kolakowski is “that there should be at least the germ of
class-consciousness, an elementary sense of common interest and shared opposition to
other classes”.vii
Two basic classes oppose each other in the capitalist system: the owners of the
means of production, or bourgeoise, and the workers, or proletariat. viii When the
proletariat has become aware of his loss, it will be possible for him to proceed to a
radical transformation of his situation by a revolution. The proletariat revolution will
bring forth the dictatorship of the proletariat, the social classes would disappear, and
class struggle would fade into history. “The withering away of class boundaries would
be followed by a withering away of the state and the emergence of a fully communist
society characterized in part by the complete absence of classes and class struggle.”ix

3
ALIENATION
There is a need to elaborate the idea of alienation to illustrate why the class struggle
eventually proletariat revolution, according to Marx will inevitably happen. Living in
a capitalist society, however, man is not truly free. He is an alienated being. The idea
of alienation, which Marx takes from Hegel and Feuerbach x, plays a fundamental role
in his written work. The alienation of labour is seen to spring from the fact that the
more the worker produces the less he must consume, and the more values he creates
the more he devalues himself, because his product and his labour are estranged from
him. The life of the worker depends on the things that he has created but that are not
his. Instead of finding his rightful existence through his labour, he loses it in this
world of things that are external to him. Alienated labour is seen as the consequence
of market product, the division of labour, and the division of society into antagonistic
classes. Market production intensifies the alienation of the labour by encouraging
specialization, piecework, and the setting up of large enterprises.
This fundamental economic alienation is accompanied by secondary political
and ideological alienations, which offer a distorted representation of and an illusory
justification of a world in which the relations of men with one another are also
distorted. Law, morality, metaphysics, and religion do not have a history of their own.
“Men developing their material production modify together with their real existence
their ways of thinking and the products of their ways of thinking.”xi
Ideological alienation expresses itself in religion. Marx considered religion to
be a product of man’s consciousness. It reflects the situation of a man who “either has
not conquered himself or has lost himself again”. In pre-industrial era, human is
frequent frustrated over their conditions, e.g., lack of primary needs: food, shelter,
transportation. As a consolation, human has created religion and vest power to it.
Whatever human can’t achieve, or needs can’t get satisfied, human seek through the
reassurance from religion. Religion has, therefore, become an alienation to human
power.
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ENGELS
Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895) began his close association and friendship with Marx
in 1844. He collaborated with Marx in the writing of The Holy Family, The German
Ideology, and The Communist Manifesto. The correspondence between them is of
fundamental importance in showing how Engels contributed by furnishing Marx with
a great amount of technical and economic date.
4
 In response to criticism of Marx’s ideas by a socialist named Eugen Dühring,
Engels published several articles that were collected under the title Herr Eugen
Dühring Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, which appeared in 1878 (Herr Eugen
Dühring's Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring]).xii
Anti-Dühring is of fundamental importance for it constitutes the link between
Marx and certain forms of modern Marxism. It contains three parts: Philosophy,
Political Economy, and Socialism. In the first, Engels attempts to establish that the
natural sciences and even mathematics are dialectical, in the sense that observable
reality is dialectical: the dialectical method of analysis and thought is imposed on men
by the material forces with which they deal. It is thus rightly applied to the study of
history and human society. "Motion, in effect, is the mode of existence of matter,"
Engels writes. In using materialistic dialectic to make a critique of Dühring's thesis,
according to which political forces prevail over all the rest in the molding of history,
Engels provides a good illustration of the materialistic idea of history, which puts the
stress on the prime role of production as driving forces in history.
The other chapters of the section Political Economy form an introduction to
the principal economic ideas of Marx: value, labour, capital, and surplus value. The
section Socialism starts by formulating anew the critique of the capitalist system as it
was made in Capital. At the end of the chapters devoted to production, distribution,
the state, the family, and education, Engels outlines what the socialist society will be
like, a society in which the notion of value has no longer anything to do with the
distribution of the goods produced because all labour "becomes at once and directly
social labour…" A production plan will coordinate the economy. The division of
labour and the separation of town and the country will disappear with the "suppression
of the capitalist character of modern industry." Industry will be located throughout the
country in the collective interest, and thus the opposition between town and country
will disappear—to the profit of both industry and agriculture. Finally, after the
liberation of man from the condition of servitude in which the capitalist mode of
production holds him, the state will also be abolished, and religion will disappear by
"natural death." One of the most remarkable features of Anti-Dühring is the insistence
with which Engels refuses to base socialism on absolute values. He admits only
relative values, linked to historical, economic, and social conditions.

5
3.0 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARXISM
The history of Marxism can be seen as dividing naturally into seven stages. The first
witnessed Marx’s and Engels’ early efforts after 1848. The second was marked by the
growth of German Social Democracy and reformism to 1914. Among this strain of
Marxism are Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, the radicals: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht. The Austrian school came into being when Austrian socialists started
publishing their works independently of the Germans; it can be dated from either 1904
(beginning of the Marx-Studien collection) or 1907 (publication of the magazine Der
Kampf). The most important members of the school were Max Adler, Karl Renner,
Rudolf Hilferding, Gustav Eckstein, Friedrich Adler, and Otto Bauer.
RUSSIAN AND SOVIET MARXISM
Lenin, the Russian Revolution, and the setting in concrete of dialectical materialism
(1917 to around 1937) define the third.
Das Kapital was translated into Russian in 1872. Marx kept up steady relations
with the Russian socialists and took an interest in the economic and social conditions
of the tsarist empire. The man who originally introduced Marxism into Russia was
Georgi Plekhanov, but the man who adapted Marxism to Russian conditions was
Lenin.
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, or Lenin, was born in1870 at Simbirsk. He entered
the University of Kazan to study law but was expelled the same year for participating
in student agitation. With his pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1902), he specified the
theoretical principles and organization of a Marxist party as he thought it should be
constituted. He took part in the second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic
Workers’ Party and induced the majority of the Congress members to adopt his views.
Two factions formed at the Congress the Bolshevik (from the Russian word for
"larger") with Lenin as the leader and the Menshevik (from the Russian word for
“smaller”) with Julius Martov at the head. Lenin compared the organizational
principles of the Bolsheviks to those of the Mensheviks. After the failure of the 1905
Russian revolution, he drew positive lessons for the future in Two Tactics of Social
Democracy in the Democratic Revolution.
In 1915 at Zimmerwald, and in 1916 at Kiental, he organized two international
socialist conferences to fight against the war. Immediately after the February 1917
revolution he returned to Russia, and in October the Bolshevik coup brought him to
power.
6
 During Lenin’s developments and analyses, he rediscovered the original
thought of Marx by a careful study of his works. He saw Marxism as a practical affair
and tried to go beyond the accepted formulas to plan political action that would come
to grips with the surrounding world. In Lenin's eyes the importance of Das Kapital
was that "while explaining the structure and the development of the social formation
seen exclusively in terms of its relations of production, (Marx) has nevertheless
everywhere and always analyzed the superstructure which corresponds to these
relations of production."
Lenin laid great stress upon the dialectical method. In his early writings he
defined the dialectic as "nothing more nor less than the method of sociology, which
sees society as a living organism, in perpetual development (and not as something
mechanically assembled and thus allowing all sorts of arbitrary combinations of the
various social elements) …" (The Friends of the People, 1894). After having studied
Hegel toward the end of 1914, he took a more activist view. Dialectic is not only
evolution; it is praxis, leading from activity to reflection and from reflection to action.
Lenin also put much emphasis on the leading role of the party, as early as 1902
he was concerned with the need for a cohesive party with a correct doctrine, adapted
to the period, which would be a motive force among the masses, helping to bring them
to an awareness of their real situation. In What Is to Be Done? he called for a party of
professional revolutionaries, disciplined, and directed, capable of defeating the police;
its aim should be to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. On the eve of the
revolution of October 1917, in The State and Revolution he set forth the conditions for
the dictatorship of the proletariat and the suppression of the capitalist state.
Lenin assigned major importance to the peasantry in formulating his program.
It would be a serious error, he held, for the Russian revolutionary workers' movement
to neglect the peasants. Even though it was clear that the industrial proletariat
constituted the vanguard of the revolution, the discontent of the peasantry could be
oriented in a direction favorable to the revolution by placing among the goals of the
party the seizure of privately owned land. As early as 1903, at the third congress of the
party, he secured a resolution to this effect. Thereafter, the dictatorship of the
proletariat became the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. In 1917 he
encouraged the peasants to seize land long before the approval of agrarian reform by
the Constituent Assembly.

7
 Among Lenin's legacies to Soviet Marxism was one that proved to be injurious
to the party. This was the decision taken at his behest by the 10th congress of the party
in the spring of 1921, while the sailors were rebelling at Kronstadt and the peasants
were growing restless in the countryside, to forbid all factions, all factional activity,
and all opposition political platforms within the party. This decision had grave
consequences in later years when Stalin used it against his opponents.
It is Joseph Stalin who codified the body of ideas that, under the name of
Marxism-Leninism, has constituted the official doctrine of the Soviet and eastern
European communist parties. Stalin was a man of action in a slightly different sense
than was Lenin. Gradually taking over power after Lenin's death in 1924, he pursued
the development of the Soviet Union with great vigor. By practicing Marxism, he
assimilated it, at the same time simplifying it.
Stalin's materialist and historical dialectic differs sharply from the perspective
of Karl Marx. In The Communist Difference between Manifesto Marx applied the
materialist dialectic to the ideas Marx's and social and political life of his time. What
counted for him, however, was not only the struggle but also the birth of
consciousness of the propositions among put the proletariat.
The result of Stalin's dialectic, however, was what he called “revolution from
above, a dictatorial policy to increase industrialization and collectivize agriculture
based upon ruthless repression and a strong centralization of power. For Stalin what
counted was the immediate goal, the practical result. The move was from a dialectic
that emphasized both the objective and the subjective to one purely objective, or more
exactly, objectivist. Human actions are to be judged not by taking account of the
intentions of the actor and their place in a given historical web but only in terms of
what they signify objectively at the end of the period considered.”xiii
Alongside Marxism-Leninism as ex-pounded in the former Soviet Union, there
arose another point of view expressed by Stalin's opponent Leon Trotsky and his
followers. Trotsky played a leading role in both the Russian Revolution of 1905 and
that of 1917. After Lenin's death he fell out with Stalin. Their conflict turned largely
upon questions of policy, both domestic and foreign. In the realm of ideas, Trotsky
held that a revolution in a backward, rural country could be carried out only by the
proletariat. Once in power the proletariat must carry out agrarian reform and
undertake the accelerated development of the economy. The revolution must be a

8
socialist one, involving the abolition of the private ownership of the means of
production, or else it will fail.
But the revolution cannot be carried out in isolation, as Stalin maintained it
could. The capitalist countries will try to destroy it; moreover, to succeed the
revolution must be able to draw upon the industrial techniques of the developed
countries. For these reasons the revolution must be worldwide and permanent,
directed against the liberal and nationalist bourgeoisie of all countries and using local
victories to advance the international struggle. Tactically, Trotsky emphasized the
necessity of finding or creating a revolutionary situation, of educating the working
class to revolutionize it, of seeing that the party remained open to the various
revolutionary tendencies and avoided becoming bureaucratized, and finally, when the
time for insurrection comes, of organizing it according to a detailed plan.xiv
VARIANTS OF MARXISM
In the fourth stage, the Chinese Revolution of 1949 dominates. In the fifth, after 1945,
Marxism–Leninism proliferated throughout the Third World. A sixth stage (1950s–
1980s) of official ossification and sluggish development through command economies
runs parallel with a revival of interest in Marx, driven by the early writings. A seventh
stage of degeneration and collapse (1989–91) then follows, except a few societies:
most were utterly transformed (China, Vietnam), others fossilized in extreme
Stalinism (North Korea) or more moderate variations thereon (Cuba, Belarus)”.xv
WESTERN MARXISM
Western Marxism can be seen as a repudiation of Marxism-Leninism, although, when
it was first formulated in the 1920s, its proponents believed they were loyal to the
dominant Soviet Communist Party. Prominent figures in the evolution of Western
Marxism include the central Europeans György Lukåcs, Karl Korsch, and Lucien
Goldmann; Antonio Gramsci of Italy; the German theorists who constituted the
Frankfurt school, especially Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and
Jürgen Habermas; and Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
of France.
In Vienna Lukács (1885-1971) rewrote the essays which make up his chief
work, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923). A main
concern here was to undermine the scientific basis of official Marxism. Lukács
rejected Engels’ application of dialectics to nature and stress the objective aspects oof
class consciousness. His ideal of communism was little different from Marx’s or
9
Lenin’s, its ultimate objective being ‘the construction of a society in which freedom of
morality will take the place of legal compulsion in the regulation of all behavior.
Lukács developed the concept of reification to explain distortions in our
consciousness of reality, and particularly the idea that we are ruled by laws beyond
our control and thus fail to understand the ‘totality’ of the world. In Moscow in 1921
for the third Comintern congress, Lukács succumbed to Lenin’s charisma, and after
his death produced a fawning account of him. He insists on the Party’s leading role as
embodying the dictatorship of the proletariat despite critical of Stalin in later years.
Late in life he asserted that ‘the economic theories of Marx are not really correct’, and
that ‘The core of Marx is really his view of history and his analysis of social
consciousness.’ He also became an influential aesthetic and literary critic and wrote an
important study of irrationalism as a source of National Socialism.xvi
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a socialist by 1914, believed the future would
bring ‘the maximum of liberty with the minimum of constraint’. Active in organizing
industrial workers in Turin, he viewed factory councils as anticipating a new form of
elected socialist management. When Mussolini’s fascists came to power, Gramsci
viewed them as a petty-bourgeois mass movement animated by hatred of the working
class. In November 1926 he was arrested and sentenced to twenty years’
imprisonment. Plentifully supplied with books, he read and wrote widely on subjects
as diverse as folklore, linguistics, and the Italian intelligentsia, filling some thirty-two
notebooks. He was never freed and died eleven years later of maltreatment and ill
health.
Gramsci’s most enduring theme lay in the judgement that capitalism’s success
involved its hegemonic control over the worldview of the majority through the
manufacturing and ordering of consent. Like Lukács, Gramsci thought Engels’ version
of materialism vulgarized Marx’s more subtle Hegelian formulations. He rejected any
hard interpretation of historical inevitability, insisting that the revolutionary contest
would be protracted.
Gramsci’s Prison Letters and Prison Notebooks established him as first and
foremost a theorist of cultural hegemony within capitalism, and of the means of
overcoming it. ‘False consciousness’ explained why the working classes could not
grasp capitalism’s true nature. This theory remains Gramsci’s main legacy, whose
relevance today in an era of even greater media concentration is obvious.

10
 Due to the limitation of space, there are quite a few key developments of
Marxism are not gone into detail. For example, Karl Korsch, Lucien Goldmann, and
the German theorists who constituted the Frankfurt school. For reader who are
interested, can refer to Kołakowski Volume 2 and 3 (1976).
Next, we will look at the Marxism remains in today and ask what has changed
and what else reamin relevant and usable of Marxism.

4.0 TODAY’S MARXISM

In 1989 the Berlin Wall was breached, marking the end of the Marxist regime in East
Germany. In 1991 the Marxist regime in the Soviet Union collapsed, its communist
empire in Europe already fallen. “With the collapse of communism, people have come
to dismiss Marx as an irrelevance, but this is wrong”, wrote Ha Joon Chang, an
economist.xvii In this section, the failure of Marxism is first summarized. Then,
consider how far has the world change and what Marxism can still teach us.
On the negative side, the failings of Marxism include: an overly determinist
idea of progress, especially the ‘inevitability’ of socialist revolution; adherence to the
‘scientific’ nature of the theory of surplus value, while excluding other theories of
exploitation; an overly vague and optimistic conception of the end-point, ‘communist
society’; a view of the proletariat which wrongly assumed that it was more virtuous
than other groups, coupled with antagonism towards ‘class enemies’; an over-
optimistic assumption that the state might disappear in a future democratic society; too
little stress on the value of individuality; a tendency to reduce human motives to the
economic excluding the pursuit of power in particular; extreme economic
centralization and bureaucratization; a poorly conceived theory of the ‘dictatorship of
the proletariat’ which has been used to excuse the excesses of arbitrary power; the
persecution of traditional religions and ethnic minorities; an inability to assess
adequately the power of ideas; an overemphasis on the centrality of work to life; and
an incapacity to comprehend the recurrent power of nationalism and ethnic and
religious identity.xviii
Marx predicted that (Singer, 2000):
 The income gap between capitalists and workers will increase.

11
  More and more independent producers will be forced into the
proletariat, leaving a few rich capitalists and a mass of poor
workers.
 Workers’ wages will, with short-lived exceptions, remain at
subsistence level.
 The rate of profit will fall
 Capitalism will collapse because of its internal contradictions.
 Proletariat revolutions will occur in the most industrially advanced
countries.
With the hindsight, most of these predictions are clearly mistaken.
Factory workers today earn considerably more than they need to
remain alive and reproducing. The rate of profit has not gone into a
steady decline. Capitalism has gone through several crises, but
nowhere has it collapsed as a result of its alleged internal
contradictions. Proletarian revolutions have broken out in the less
developed nations, rather than the more developed ones.
(Singer, 2000, p. 149)
Marx has underestimated the creative – destructive feature of capitalism xix,
which is the ability of capitalism to make everybody richer by making product
cheaper. He also fails to foresee capitalist by creating welfare states that redistributed
wealth through taxation. Therefore, had not yet led capitalism into its contradictions.
His view of the ease and speed with which the working class will overthrow the class
system and establish a Communist classless society turn out to be harder than he
thought it would be.
Today, we knew Marxism doesn’t work because we have evidence that was
not available to Marx – evidence of the failure of deliberate attempts to create
egalitarian societies on the basis of the abolition of private ownership of the means of
production and exchange, and evidence of the hierarchical nature of non-human
societiesxx.
However, the mistaken view of Marx’s predictions is not necessary to
disregard his ideas. Such errors merely show that those who made them are fallible.
There are three features remain usable that stand out. First, Marx’s vision of a
life fulfilling life after and beyond work is more valuable than ever. Machines made

12
free time possible for the many. Many today are so fortunate, and indeed have found
their hours of labour increasing in recent year, and the age of retirement rising
inexorably. Poverty can be abolished. A new surge of mechanization may make
possible a ‘post-work’ society. “This may seem a pale shadow of idea of abolishing all
servitude and providing a humane environment in which our best qualities can
flourish.”xxi
Second, Marx’s image of future rested on his theory of alienation, with some
modifications, may still be applicable in twenty-first century. If we take Marx to have
prioritized direct personal communication, there is a massive increase in
technologically induced alienation. Though many of these forms derive not from
capitalism but from our relationship to machinery, alienation remains a vital way of
approaching our condition.
Third, Marx’s analysis of capitalism, suitably updated, remains extremely
relevant. Although toleration of difference in race, gender and other distinctions has
grown, in the early twenty -first century the concentration of wealth continues to
increase. Lead to a condition where rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. The
disparity between the rich and the poor getting bigger.
Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system
which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is
still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and
equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.
(Singer, 2000)

5.0 CONCLUSION
Through the study of Karl Marx’s thought, the development of Marxism history, and
the application of Marxism, Marxism theory is be concluded here. Of course, there are
regrets that still has more of Marxism that are not touched upon, e.g., the regulations
of labour in Capital, value (the simple and complex), the humanism in Marxism etc.
Marxism being a subject that has been developed in the past 150 years, it is impossible
to grasp all of it in this short essay. Therefore, an annotated bibliography for further
reading is prepared in the last of the notes.
Marx, in his era, attempts to emancipate consciousness from the tyranny of
economic exploitation. Back in nineteenth-century industrial Europe, where the
inhuman conditions of factory labor became the most obvious obstacles to the
13
worker’s freedom to order their own experience, Marx’s message was especially
relevant. Today, thanks to the welfare-state, and a constant struggle of working class,
the working condition has become much better than that era.
But the attempts to free consciousness are not done yet. ‘False consciousness’
turns out in many ways to be the toughest of nuts to crack: misinformation,
disinformation, spin and ‘fake news’ abound as never before. There is a need to come
with a dialectic solution to deal with the flood of information and lack of clarity in the
current era. The reformation of capitalism has also become an urgent task than those
of Marx era, as the disparity between the poor and the rich is getting bigger.

14
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHYxxii
Baylis, J., Smith, S., & Owens, P. (Eds.). (2017). The Globalization of World Politics;
An introduction to International Relations (7th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Claeys, G. (2018). Marx and Marxism. UK: Penguin Random House.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: THe Psychology of Optimal Experience. New
York, NY: Harper Perennial.
Eagleton, T. (2011). Why Marx was right. London: Yale University Press.
Geuss, R. (2013). Marxism by Raymond Geuss: A Free Course. (K. Everdene, Ed.)
Retrieved from https://youtu.be/tFW6EjxP2K8
Harvey, D. (2011). The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. London:
Profile Books.
Kołakowski, L. (1976). Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution.
Volume 1, The Founders; volume 2, The Golden Age; volume 3, The
Breakdown. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marx, K. (1955). The Poverty of Philosophy. Progress Publishers.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Moscow: Progress
Publishers.
Pirie, M., & Pirie. (2009). 101 Great Philosophers : Makers of Modern Thought.
London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Safra, J. E. (Ed.). (1998). The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropedia, Knowledge
in Depth (15th ed., Vol. 23). Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.
Singer, P. (2000). Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press.
The World Book Britannica: M (Vol. 13). (1982). Chicago: World Book-Childcraft
International.
Walker, D., & Gray, D. (2009). The A to Z of Marxism. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.
Who Goes There - A Primer on Communism (1963). [Motion Picture]. Retrieved from
https://archive.org/details/whogoesthereaprimeroncommunism
Woodfin, R., & Zarate, O. (2013). Introducing Marxism. London: Icon Books.

I
NOTES

II
i
“The word Marxism seems to have appeared first in the 1880s, and, although its originator cannot be clearly
identified, it was certainly used in 1882 by the anarchist Paul Brousse in a pamphlet criticizing Marxists
entitled Le Marxisme dans l’Internationale.” (Walker & Gray, 2009, p. 22) For more explanation on
development and use of the term Marxism, see (Walker & Gray, 2009, pp. 22-24)
ii
(Csikszentmihalyi, 2008, p. 280)
iii
“Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) is regarded as the culmination of German idealism…Hegel’s
system supposes that fundamental structure of reality must be discernible from the structure of our own
thought, in that reality itself is rational”. In that case the key is dialectic. “His dialectic, stripped of ‘Spirit’,
became Marx’s dialectical materialism, predicting the inevitable triumph of communism.” (Pirie & Pirie, 2009,
pp. 115-16)
iv
(Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1955, p. 49)
v
(Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, p. 14)
vi
(Kołakowski, 1976, Volume 1, pp.353)
vii
(Kołakowski, 1976, Volume 1, pp.356)
viii
(Safra, 1998, p. 537; Kołakowski, 1976, Volume 1, pp.352-58)
ix
(Walker & Gray, 2009, p. 71)
x
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872), a German anthropologist and philosopher, “, author of The Essence of
Christianity, rescued the Hegelian Left from its bondage to the philosophy of self- consciousness and not only
led the critique of religious belief to its ultimate conclusion, but extended it to all forms of philosophical
idealism and unequivocally espoused the point of view which treats all spiritual life as a product of nature.”
(Kołakowski, 1976, Volume 1, p. 108)
xi
(Safra, 1998, p. 536)
xii
(Safra, 1998, p. 538)
xiii
(Safra, 1998, p. 540)
xiv
Ibid.
xv
(Claeys, 2018, p. 249)
xvi
(Claeys, 2018, pp. 218-19)
xvii
Ha Joon Chang. n.d. Economists Who Have Influenced Me. Retrieved from
https://hajoonchang.net/economists-who-have-influenced-me/
xviii
(Claeys, 2018, p. 252)
xix
(Harvey, 2011, p. 56)
xx
“No society, no matter how egalitarian its rhetoric, has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler
and ruled”, Singer (2000) wrote, “…the prevalence of hierarchy is not limited to human societies. There are
clear hierarchies among most social birds and mammals, including those species most nearly related to human
beings. Farmers have always known that barnyard flocks of hens develop a ‘pecking order’ in which each hen
has a rank, allowing her to peck at and drive away from food birds below her in rank, but to be pecked by, and
forced to give up food to, those above her. More careful studies have shown that similar hierarchies exist
among wolves, deer, lions, baboons, and chimpanzees, to name only a few of the species studied.”
xxi
(Claeys, 2018, p. 234)
xxii
Annotated Bibliography.
https://ukmedumy-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/a189386_siswa_ukm_edu_my/
EdYTiBHebZFKqVn48ENPBcgBcC7z60tKc8nEdrQ9d9XwHQ?e=VIvnJm