was an important figure in the development of Marxism. There are endless interpretations of the "philosophy of Marx", from the interior of the Marxist movement as well as in its exterior. Although some have separated Marx's works between a "
young Marx" (in particular the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) and a "mature Marx" or also by separating it into purely philosophical works, economics works and political and historical interventions, Étienne Balibar has pointed out that Marx's works can be divided into "economic works" (
Das Kapital, 1867), "philosophical works" and "historical works" (
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the 1871
Civil War in France which concerned the
Paris Commune and acclaimed it as the first "
dictatorship of the proletariat", etc.) Étienne Balibar claimed that if one philosopher could be called a "Marxist philosopher", that one would doubtlessly be
Louis Althusser: Althusser proposed a 'new definition' of philosophy as "class struggle in theory"... Marxism had proper signification (and original "problematic")
only insofar as it was the theory of
the tendency towards communism, and
in view of its realization. The criteria of acceptance or rejection of a 'marxist' proposition was always the same, whether it was presented as 'epistemological' or as 'philosophical': it was in the act of rendering intelligible a
communist policy, or not." (
Ecrits pour Althusser, 1991, p.98). In 1938, Trotsky had written
"Their Morals and Ours" which consisted of
ethical polemics in response to criticisms around his actions concerning the Kronstadt rebellion and wider questions posed around the perceived, "amoral" methods of the Bolsheviks. Critics believed these methods seemed to emulate the Jesuit maxim that the "
ends justifies the means". Trotsky argued that Marxism situated the foundation of morality as a product of society to
serve social interests rather than "eternal moral truths" proclaimed by institutional religions. On the other hand, he regarded it as farcical to assert that an end could justify any criminal means and viewed this to be a distorted representation of the
Jesuit maxim. Instead, Trotsky believed that the means and ends frequently "exchanged places" as when
democracy is sought by the working class as an instrument to actualize socialism. He also viewed revolution to be deducible from the laws of the development and primarily the class struggle but this did not mean all means are permissible. Marx's critique of the ideology of the human rights thus departs from the
counterrevolutionary critique by
Edmund Burke, who dismissed the "rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of the individual": it is not grounded on an opposition to the
Enlightenment's
universalism and
humanist project on behalf of the right of
tradition, as in Burke's case, but rather on the claim that the ideology of economism and the ideology of the human rights are the reverse sides of the same coin. However, as Étienne Balibar puts it, "the accent put on those contradictions can not not ring out on the signification of 'human rights', since these therefore appears
both as the language in which
exploitation masks itself and as the one in which the exploited class struggle express itself: more than a truth or an illusion, it is therefore a
stake".
Das Kapital ironizes on the "pompous catalogue of the human rights" in comparison to the "modest
Magna Charta of a day work limited by law": But the communist revolution does not end with the negation of individual liberty and equality ("
collectivism"), but with the "negation of the negation": "individual property" in the capitalist regime is in fact the "expropriation of the immediate producers." "Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor... The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the
capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.
Criticisms of Ludwig Feuerbach What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's
humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give
ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in
The German Ideology (1846): In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
Historical materialism Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as
historical materialism (this term was coined by Engels and popularised by
Karl Kautsky and
Georgi Plekhanov), in the 1859 preface to
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material
forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The
mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
Revisionism In Marxist philosophy, "revisionism", otherwise known as "Marxist reformism", represents various ideas, principles, and theories that are based on a
reform or revision of
Marxism. According to their critics, this involves a significant revision of
fundamental Marxist theories and premises, and usually involves making an alliance with the
bourgeois class. Some academic economists have used
revisionism to describe
post-Stalinist, Eastern European writers who criticized
one-party rule and argued in favour of
freedom of the press and
of the arts, intra- and sometimes inter-party democracy, independent
labour unions, the abolition of bureaucratic privileges, and the subordination of police forces to the judiciary power. In Marxist discourse,
revisionism often carries
pejorative connotations and the term has been used by many different factions. It is typically applied to others and rarely as a self-description. By extension, Marxists who view themselves as fighting against revisionism have often self-identified as Marxist–Leninist
anti-revisionists.
Revisionism is most often used as an epithet by those Marxists who believe that such revisions are unwarranted and represent a watering down or abandonment of Marxism—one such common example is the negation of
class struggle. , an early revisionist Revisionism has been used in a number of contexts to refer to different or claimed revisions of
Marxist theory. Those who opposed
Karl Marx's revolution through his lens of
class struggle and sought out non-revolutionary or more conciliatory means for a change are known as revisionists.
Eduard Bernstein, a close acquaintance of Marx and
Friedrich Engels, was one of the first major revisionists, and was prominent in the
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In the late 19th century, the term
revisionism was used to describe
reformist socialist writers, such as Bernstein, who sought to revise Marx's ideas about the transition to socialism and claimed that a revolution was not necessary to achieve a socialist society. The views of Bernstein gave rise to
evolutionary socialism, which asserts that socialism can be achieved through gradual peaceful reforms from within a capitalist system. ==Differences within Marxist philosophy==