PHILOSOPHY

Marxism

Marxism is the movement founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels which fights for the self-emancipation of the working class, subjecting all forms of domination by the bourgeoisie, its institutions and its ideology, to theoretical and practical critique.

Standing for the destruction of the capitalist state by the organised working class, Marxism is opposes all forms of reformism and “gradualism” or “evolutionary socialism”; Marxism is Revolutionary.

Marxism shares with other progressive social movements an uncompromising hostility to all forms of domination — sexism, racism, and so on, but what marks Marxism out from other progressive movements is that Marxists struggle always to overcome the manifold forms of domination and exploitation in and through the self-emancipation of the working class. Thus Marxism is Revolutionary Socialism.

While Marxism stands for the destruction of the capitalist state, and has as its aim the withering away of the state and all forms of institutionalised violence, Marxists not only support the right of the working class to exercise a domination over the bourgeoisie, they actively fight for that, since the dictatorship of the proletariat is the possible way to destroy bourgeois rule and open the way to the disappearance of all classes, including the class of wage-slaves. Marxism has its origins in the struggle for this perspective, in opposition to anarchism which seeks to undermine all forms of authority and seeks destruction of the capitalist state without promoting and preparing the working class for the seizure and holding of public political power.

Social power and relations of domination are transmitted in many different forms, aside from the state, nevertheless “concentrated force is required to overthrow concentrated force”, so Marxists always struggle to develop the organised strength of the workers movement. Freedom is always limited by the opportunities that the community provides for the development of a personality. Freedom is not enhanced simply by the removal of limitations on the autonomy of individuals. Marxists aim to enhance the freedom of working class people chiefly by expanding the scope of collective action and the possibilities for individual growth and creativity within that.

Marxism is a tendency within the workers movement and it is concerned with both theoretical and practical critique. By “practical critique” is meant political action which undermines and “exposes” the object and mobilises opposition to it. In the history of the movement, these two sides — the theoretical and the practical — have from time to time become separated from one another; one the one side “academic Marxism” working on theoretical questions in relative isolation from the workers’ movement, on the other genuine communists doing battle for the working class, but isolated from the creative development of revolutionary Marxist ideas.