Marxism theory of ideas

Although in the very first beginning, the pamphlet had very little impact on the widespread revolutionary movements in Europe in the mid- 19th century, the communist manifesto was indeed to become the very most popular and widely discussed documents of the 20th century. Marx fought to discuss, present and differentiate his  brand of socialism  ideas distinctively  from a class of others  insisting  that his  ideas were scientifically  rooted in the objective study of the history of society in which he perceived  as a prolonged continuous  process of change resulting to transformation.

Marx claimed that just like in the same way feudalism emerged naturally and evolved relatively into mercantilism and then capitalism. Therefore, in the same way feudalism emerged, capitalism would therefore raise and unfold itself creating and giving way for its logical successor which he referred to as socialism. A term which Marx used in his ideology as a representative of the of the most advanced form of communism which would be the most necessary product of class struggle.

 Marx strongly advocated that the tough minded realism should wake up and raise over the utopian idealism which existed earlier among the socialist and it had various profound effects consequences. This ideology further enhanced various revolutionaries such as Lenin to be incorporated into action while at the same time, it also discouraged majority of its followers from accepting ruthless means in order to be able to justify what was believed to be the most significant historically necessary ends.

Radical politics were much more discussed widely rather than the number of radicals justified. But Marx did not totally adapt this ideologies but he strongly used them intensively for his own advantage by strongly proclaiming that any kind of ideology so well feared should and must be significantly explained clearly to show its worth.

In his prologue, Marx claimed that Europe was experiencing a haunting specter and this was the communism specter. In this statement, Marx claimed that all the old powers of have evolved, raised and entered into yet a new form of holy alliance in order to exorcise this luring specter, which had influenced all the people including the pope of the great Catholic church, and Czar, the German police spies and the French radicals. From this debate two significant facts became evident. That is,

Communism became highly acknowledged among all European powers as being in itself a power of some kind.

It also became one the high time when communists broadly came into open and in face to face with the entire world publishing their tendencies, views and aims to meet the most nursery tale of the communist specter by establishing and creating a manifesto of its own party.

For Marx the rich history of the hitherto existing society is basically the real history of class struggle. Marx characterized the society as structured into social classes which are maintained loosely by the existence of class struggle between the various opposing structures. In this structures Marx categorized the classes in the society as 1) the patrician and plebeian, 2) guildmaster and journeyman 3) the lord and the serf and 4) Freeman and slave. Marx further categorized all these clusters to be encompassed in a word as oppressor and the oppressed.

These clusters stand in constant confrontation facing each other opposing one another and carrying on uninterrupted hidden fight which ultimately ends either in as a common ruin of the contending classes or rather through a revolutionary reconstruction of society. Marx asserts that in almost all the earlier epochs of history, the epoch of each category of bourgeoisie there exist a very complicated form and arrangements of society in distinctively various orders characterized by a manifold gradation of social orders or ranks.

For instance,  in the ancient Rome there were, knights, patricians, plebeians, feudal lords, guild-masters, apprentices, journeymen, serfs  and  slaves in the Middle Age. All these classes subordinate and gain through gradations. The modern bourgeoisie in the present societies sprouted and emerged as a result of ruins of the feudal society, and they have yet not done away with the luring class antagonisms which continue to characterize the modern societies.

However, these classes continue advance through the creation new classes characterized by new forms of struggle which emerge to replace the old ones and new conditions of expression. Our epoch which forms the epoch of our bourgeoisies, possesses distinctively various features of power, control and oppression. Thus, this form of an epoch has further simplified the forms of class antagonisms which continue to manifest themselves in the society today.

The society by far continues to advance in complexity splitting more and more into two great hostile classes or camps directly facing and opposing each other. That is, the bourgeoisies and the proletariats. The establishment of the modern industries has led to the creation of world markets, and the discovery of America which has paved way for more class antagonism. As a result, the creation of this market has translated to the growth of immense developments in navigation, commerce and land communication.

This kind of development has In turn reacted towards the creation, expansion and extension of industry and in the same proportion of industry navigation, commerce and railways have extensively expanded in promotion of world trade while in the same proportion of growth, they have promoted the development of bourgeoisies increasing their capital and pushing into the background all forms of classes from the Middle Ages.

From this trend in development we clearly observe the emergence and development of modern bourgeoisies as in itself a product of the prolonged course of development, through a series of revolutions occurring within the various forms of production and exchange.

According to Marx, every single step in the development and advancement of the bourgeoisies is usually accompanied by a set of corresponding political advancements in that class. An oppressed class exists under the sway of a certain form of feudal nobility which results into a form of an armed self regulating and governing association in a certain kind of a medieval commune.

According to Karl Marx, bourgeoisie play a very significant role especially the revolutionary role of history. Whenever they existed, the bourgeoisie possessed an upper hand which has put to an end all forms of feudal, idyllic, patriarchal relations. Nevertheless, the bourgeoisie have pitilessly torn apart the motley of the feudal ties which binds man with his natural superiors leaving man with no significant bonds between man and man and to the latter only the naked self interest of man.

This kind of a class has drawn away the most heavenly ecstasies deeply inculcated into religious fervor, characterized by chivalrous enthusiasm and sentimentalism of the egoistic calculations of icy waters. Additionally, it has translated personal growth into certain forms of exchange value replacing them with numberless indefeasible freedoms, thus setting up a single unconceivable freedom in the name of free trade. In one word, Marx, refers this kind of situation as exploitation, veiled by political and religious illusions substituted by shameless, naked, brutal and direct forms of exploitation.

In what other significant ways does the history of ideas generate proves that intellectual production significantly changes in its form and character in the same proportion as the production of materials advances. Marx asserts that the ruling class has been forever the ideas of the ruling class for each age in development. When we speak in our day to day conversations, of the ideas that revolutionize our societies, we do but unconscious express that the within the parameters of the old society very new elements of rather a new society have been created and this kind of dissolution of old ideas constantly maintains and keeps an even pace which characterizes a dissolution of the old conditions of societal existence.

History has it that when the old world had reached its last throes, the historical religions were overcome by the modern Christianity. In the eighteenth century, as the Christian ideas succumbed into rationalists ideas,   the existing forms of feudal societies rose and fought a death battle with the ruling bourgeoisie class of the day. The great ideas of freedom of conscience and religious liberty merely gave permission for expression resulting to a sway of significant competition within the diverse domain of knowledge. Thus, with no doubt it can be strongly argued that religion, judicial ideas, moral and philosophical ideas have greatly been modified along the course of historical advancement and growth. However, religion, philosophy, morality, laws and political science have constantly survived this kind of a change.

There is in addition other forms of external truths such as justice and religion that are significantly common in all forms of societies and states, but in the existence of communism, it sweeps and abolishes away all forms of morality and all region and instead of constituting them, in relatively a new base it acts in contradictions opposing the past historical experiences. This therefore, explains that the history of the past historical perception of society consistently influences emergence of class antagonism, a certain kind of antagonism which assume different forms at different epochs.

Communist revolution explains one of the most radical rupture which also promotes an understanding which explains about the traditional relations property by applying most radical raptures of the ancient traditional ideas. Like in every other revolution, communists strongly support revolutionary movements which rise against the existing political and social order of events and things. All these kind of revolutionary movements bring at hand the most intriguing question and the question of property despite its level of development at that particular time.

The theory sounds impressive and it draws my attention to the present day categorization and structuralization of the society and the kind of relationships which characterizes the modern human existence. Reflecting at the theory it is evident that the history of the modern societies can be traced back to the long gone days of social classes and structures which characterized the feudal societies. Communist holds that clear ends can only be achieved through forceful overthrow of the existing forms of social conditions. Which would therefore makes the ruling class to tremble at the face of communist revolution while the proletarians will have nothing to lose despite their chains and they will have a world to win and cherish if all workingmen in all the nations unite.

Lenins path as a political radical was highly influenced by his childhood experiences especially involving the death of one of his sister and the arrest of another who was banished and send away from home due to the existing dictatorship kind of leadership during this period. Such events transformed Lenin and challenged him to become a political radical which is actually presented in the Soviet biographies as one his very first tracks of his revolutionary political life.

His dream was to work towards complementing those personal, political, emotional upheavals which existed with the society by then. During his University life in 1887, Lenin studied law and greatly read the writings of Karl Marx intensively and extensively, which also moved his political aspirations and thought .During this period the Marxism derived political ideas challenged him and he got himself into a messy riot while at university which saw his expulsion and the authorities barred him from joining any other university. He later completed his law degree privately.

Between the years 1907 to 1916, Lenin established a program which specifically targeted the capitalism development in Russian countryside and it was highly intended to prepare the Russian community materials for social foundation socialism, and it would also provide an alternative function for the tsarists regime through a pro led capitalist efforts. During this period Lenin greatly hopped for a Marxist revolution by the bourgeoisie. It was during this period when Lenin declared that the people of Russia were already tired of being under the control of the leadership of one ruler (czar) and the great ideas of communism, socialism and Marxism inspired them and especially Lenin to think of other possible ways of governance.

As a result of this feeling, majority of them rebelled and turned to Lenin who was promising them a relatively better future. This move begun with great the ideas of Karl Marx which stated that in the end communist would not be the best path for Russia to take. It is this political ideology that gave him this popular Marxism reputation and his ideas became widely acknowledged. The Marxism 20th century ideas communicated by Lenin had had great profound moral ideas even bordering religious significance.

Leninism further developed as a practice and a theory on the practice of dictatorship of the proletariats vaguely led by revolutionary party. Theoretical Leninism formed a combination of socialist economic and political theories derived from Marxism and Lenins interpretation of the Marxist theory in order to fit well in the agrarian Russian empire of the day. In his ideologies Lenin reversed the Marxist order of economic infiltration of the society over politics, thus allowing for the creation of a political revolutionary in the year 1917, and Lenin formed the ideological base for the soviet socialism and more specifically the Russian realization of its new soviet union.

In his interpretation of Marxist ideas he did not only focus of the class struggles that characterize the society, but he looked at the society at a broader perspective and saw the world being structured into these classes that Marx had talked about, with countries exploiting and oppressing others and from this ideology, wrote his second  pamphlet , Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in the year 1916, where he described a certain kind of development in which Marx had predicted that capitalism would ones become a global system especially in the most advanced industrial nations and states exporting financial capital to different colonial countries with an aim to exploit their resources and their cheap labor.

Lenin saw this superexploitaion of poor countries would promote and allow the capitalist countries maintain some kind of homeland worker at a relatively higher standard of living at the same time subjudicating and oppressing the poor in order to maintain and ensure some forms of peaceful coexistence of labor capital relations characterized by aspects such as globalization and labor aristocracy.

In this state Lenin claimed that a proletariat revolution would never occur in developed capitalist countries in an imperialist global system which was tightly intact and organized into systems and structures. In this case the under developed countries would thus feature the very first proletariat revolution and imperialism Russia was by them the poorest and weakest country in the capitalist global system.

In the year 1915, Lenin wrote urging the world workers to unite and fight the uneven economic and political developments which were absolutely capitalist. Thus Lenin saw the victory of socialism as possible and all what one was supposed to think about was how to institute a socialist democracy and a revolutionary strategy. Lenin unlike Marx talked about the organizational categorization of institutions which had diverse social practices as those observed in Marxs social classes.

Lenin saw the creation of a socialist country in organized social production would raise and organize it own socialist production and it would stand against the rest of the world. Lenis ideas and political thoughts highly differed from Marx in different substantial ways because in his work he focused on what had to be done simply because he recognized that the proletariats had no efforts which would rather result to a revolutionary. So for Lenin, he believed that the proletariats cannot by any means attain a revolutionary consciousness and if it had to, it could only be attained through forming and establishing trade unions. Just like Marx Lenin held that the proletariats ultimate end is vested on its own material wellbeing and not the end result of alienation. Unlike Marx, Lenin recognized that the aims of the proletariats can be attained eve without a revolutionary transformation occurring within capitalism. While Marx believed that the ultimate end of capitalism is a radical revolutionary which would occur at the highest state of capitalism in industrialized countries such as France, Russian and the like. Thus, these goals could be achieved through organizing labor unions and through government initiative activities which spurred by political organizations within the proletariats.

Therefore, to achieve change Lenin proposes that the communist party formed must be precisely vanguard of proletariats. This party must be able to take political power and rule over the whole society even including the proletariats. Thus, the main goal should be focused towards creating a communism in which in a give point the proletariats would recognize its very true and real goals while the class would be destined towards establishing and creating a communist revolution. This is the only point where democratic forms of government can be achieved and come into being.

Theory of Marxism has been greatly being influential spurring the reasoning of the many even in the modern democratic countries. To the best of my knowledge, the theory is equally practical by reflecting on the manner in which the world to day is structured into systems. From Marxist ideas of class struggle we can deduce the present categorization of the world in more advanced forms and structures which are highly capitalist. Lenin observed a shift in and changes in the of societal organizations from simple structures to more complex structures in the modern age of industrialization where countries raise over to dominance exploiting and subjudicating others for materialist advantages.

This trend explains the modern kind of relationship which define the existence of the modern societies where the world is perceived as a whole global system structured into systems and structure which define the forms of interaction more so based materialist interest and self gain. For instance, in the modern societies Lenin argued that capitalism has raised to its highest t stage with increasingly growing world super powers dominating the international system, by drawing wealth towards one pole and leaving agony, brutality and toil on the other end. Toady, we have the developed and underdeveloped countries. Where under developed countries serve as the proletariats providing raw materials and cheap labor for the industrial growth for the developed. The structures are hierarchically organized and material and economic power is used as a tool for oppression.

Creation of regional and  international organization as a forum for drawing and making policies on economic issues have been established as organizations for fighting and promoting justice and equality. However, in the short run these institutions become increasingly influenced by the super powers to act in their interest promoting growth at the core and subjudicating the lower end by taking economic advantages on them.

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