Why you should be a Marxist

Marxism—relic of the past or living theory? (Pic: Adam Jones/Wikipedia commons)

Every day brings more evidence of the obscenities of the capitalist system. It should be no surprise that millions of people around the world identify with socialism.

But there are many different ideas about what it means to be a socialist.

There were socialists before Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed their theories. They believed capitalism was so obviously wrong that they could persuade everyone that socialism would be fairer and nicer.

Socialists might think they do not need Marxists to tell them that workers are exploited, that bosses are greedy and that the system breeds inequality. They say experiences are enough to show them what is wrong in society.

But Marxism doesn’t just say that workers are downtrodden. At the core of Marxism is the idea of workers’ self-emancipation.

How we understand the world shapes the strategies we use to change it. Marx and Engels went beyond moral repulsion against the cruelties of capitalism to analyse the system in a scientific way.

Their method was to look beneath the surface appearances of society in order to explore the hidden processes that propel the system forward.

This method matters. The ruling class present their own picture of the world and the very limited possibilities of changing it.

We need to counter their vision with our own understanding and strategies for radical transformation.

Marx and Engels looked beyond the grand ideas and official politics that people used to explain society. Instead, they looked at how people actually produced what they needed to live and who controlled that process.

This materialist conception of history is key to understanding that change doesn’t happen through persuading people at the top, or by replacing one set of rulers with another. It happens through class struggle.

As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. They wrote that class struggle, “always ended either in a revolutionary transformation of the whole of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes”.

Intellectuals often claim to be impartial, but neutrality is impossible in a society divided into classes. Ideas about society are always connected with some class interest or other.

Academics often present society in a fragmented way, which creates the impression that problems are separate from each other.

By contrast, Marxists see the system as a totality. That doesn’t mean rejecting important insights from non-Marxist historians and scientists. It means integrating them into a Marxist approach.

Central to that approach is the understanding of capitalism as a contradictory system. It produces an endless expansion of ways to produce commodities. But it also creates devastating waste, slumps and crises. It spills over into wars and genocide.

Marxists look to identify the changes taking place in society and work out how to respond to them.

So Marxism is a living tradition. It develops in response to new ideas and developments and the struggles of the oppressed—but without abandoning the centrality of working class self-activity.

Marx wrote that capitalism creates its own grave diggers. Each new factory, call centre or distribution network involves recruiting workers into shared conditions.

Marxists are not neutral. We see the world from the standpoint of that global working class. Why is this any better than the biased ideas of the capitalist class?

In Marx’s words, “the working class movement is the conscious movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority.”

Overthrowing capitalism is not just in the interest of the majority. It is the only way to secure the safety and freedom of the whole human race by establishing a society based on democratic, collective ownership and production for need.