GOVT 1001

TOPIC 4 SUMMARY

1. Karl Marx was born in the Rhineland, which more than any other part of Germany
had been strongly permeated with democratic ideas by the French Revolution.

2. The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel greatly influenced Marx. Although Marx
very early criticized Hegel, he never abandoned the basic categories of Hegel’s
thought.

3. Like Hegel, Marx felt that history had meaning and that it moved in a set pattern
toward a known goal.

4. French revolutionary politics was another important source for Marx’s intellectual
development.

5. Since Marx viewed economic forces as the main driving force in history, and
since he felt that industrial civilization was irresistably spreading throughout the
whole world, he was convinced that England was the country to live in and to
study industrial capitalism.

6. Marx believed that political and historical events are due to the conflict of social
forces arising from economic conditions. This he called his theory of dialectical
materialism. He advocated the concepts of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

7. The thesis represented the existing order which would be challenged and
overthrown by an antithesis and the new order that was created would be the
synthesis.

8. In Marx’s thought, the classless communist society of the future was by no

means designed to abolish the duty to work. The first stage of communism
(socialism), Marx argued, would be guided by the principle of “from each
according to his ability, to each according to his work.”

9. In the second, and final phase of communism, the principle of “from each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs” would prevail.

10. Under capitalism, Marx argues, the worker does not work in order to fulfil himself
as a person, because his work “is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour.”
 Marx argued that the proletariat (working class) only had their labour to sell for a
wage to the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) who owned and controlled the means of
production.

11. According to Marx, under capitalism people are alienated from their work, the
objects they produce, their employers, other workers, nature, and from
themselves.

12. Marx attacked the role of religion in society as it had the potential to undermine
class consciousness by offering the proletariat a means of accepting their station
in life. He called religion “the opium of the masses.”

13. In the “Communist Manifesto”, Marx and Engels explain how social change
through revolution actually occurs.

14. V.I. Lenin (1870-1924) : Lenin must be understood both as the creator of a
distinctive version of Marxism as a revolutionary theory, and also as a person
steeped in the native Russian, non-Marxist revolutionary tradition. He identified
himself as a representative and a continuer of this tradition.

15. What Lenin found enduringly valuable in this tradition was its model of the
dedicated professional revolutionist and the aspects of this tradition became
known as “Russian Jacobinism”.

16. This theory held that a revolutionary seizure of power from below should be
followed by the formation of a dictatorship of the revolutionary party, which would
use political power for the purpose of carrying through from above a
transformation of Russian society.

17. Once the revolutionary intellectuals had captured power through revolutionary
activity from below, they would rely chiefly on persuasion of the masses through
propaganda, rather than coercion, and would gradually transform the country on
socialist lines.

18. For Lenin, a proletarian dictatorship would mean a dictatorship of the

revolutionary party on behalf of the proletariat.