Karl Marx: Materialism, Alienation, and Class Struggle
Section 3: The Problem of Reality
Marx has a conception of reality and rejects dialectical materialism, idealism, and metaphysical materialism. In contrast, he overcomes the reality of thought and sees reality as a dialectical process of material production. Thus, the dialectic is material. For Marx, reality is the material activity; real life is the practical and productive human activity, which produces real men. Physically, real history is that of the modes of material production. Moreover, he believed that nature is always mediated and transformed by human productive activity. Hence, dialectical materialism states that matter is the essence of reality and is governed by laws of man outside the dialectic.
Alienation
Marx’s materialism relies on the relationship between man and nature, and man is said to have emerged from a natural being. Nature cannot be separated; they are nothing without each other. As a natural being, man has needs and materials needed to satisfy them.
Nature is an active being-practice:
- You have to make yourself into a human achievement and a progressive relationship with nature through decent workspace; man’s existence depends on it.
- Their conditions: Man is a social being; the human self-to-work is a community. Man needs to engage with others to produce and perform.
- Man is a historical being but always works the same way. Marx calls this the mode of material production, and it matches a given moment in history.
Productive activity creates exploitation, fighting, inequality, and alienation, reaching its peak in capitalism. Marx distinguished the individual producer and the produced object. To produce, the worker comes out of himself and makes contact with men and nature. Consequently, the dispossession of something of the product would be theirs. Alienation has three problems:
- The object does not belong to the working place. It becomes the property of another. He alienated the product and part of his life put into it. When the product becomes a commodity, the worker experiences alienation.
- There is no worker who does not live their work and who is forced and out. Therefore, it is not performed in work.
- A society, because of warring classes, breaks the relationship between the individual and society, and the division of labor and exchange becomes forced, alien, and hostile. Then each individual can produce according to their economic interests.
From social alienation arise politics and ideology.
The Problem of Society
Society is composed of two structures:
- Socio-economic or real life: It has two levels:
- Economic: Productive forces are developed that represent the production mode of a society. Keep in mind that when purchasing new instruments, new needs are created.
- Social: Social relations of production establish the position of people in the production process. The mode of production depends on employing forces, and production relations establish the methods of production that change over history.
- Cultural superstructure of society: It is the set of ideas, religious beliefs, moral values, political institutions, and legal acts of a society. Derived from the infrastructure, it maintains and warrants. It has two levels:
- The political-legal, organized system in which the state and the laws of a society exist.
- Culture: The ideas, values, and beliefs of society.
The relationship between real life and the superstructure is dialectical, but the former dominates.
Consciousness
Consciousness is not independent but a reflection of real life because the culture belongs to the mode of production they serve. Consciousness expresses the relationship between man or class with the world and its existence in history. But if historical materialism is used, it is a false ideology that makes man move away from the base material and create pure theories. All this is conditioned by the material base, the division of labor, and inequality, especially when it separates physical work from intellectual work. To destroy false consciousness, it is necessary to abolish the economic and social relations of those ideas by revolutionizing them.
Marx also believes that human consciousness is a product of the society they live in. It has a negative meaning of ideology; it describes man and his situation in the world in a way distorted by the interests of the ruling class to stay in a dominant position. This class has power over the production of culture. Consequently, ideology is also alienation.
Under capitalism, the whole superstructure dominates. Bourgeois ideology is based on the idea that we are all equal but only formally because it does not reach real men. The ruling class governs the state and oppresses men. According to Marx, moral values are relative to a mode of production, and there is no transhistorical morality. Besides, he thought that religion was conservative and only gave tranquilizing illusions.
Consciousness is a social product only in the interests of the proletariat and, therefore, is scientific. It arises from a theoretical and practical perspective, as the universal and particular interest is in the proletariat.
The Problem of the Meaning of History
Marx believes that the development of history is directed by dialectical laws that are necessary and universal and allow for predicting the future. Everything happens necessarily and is intended to achieve the final objective. History is a product of human action based on the succession of modes of production.
For progress to occur, there must be dialectical contradictions between productive forces and production relations. First, the productive forces change, and production relations, as an obstacle to the progress of these, are replaced by others, thus revolutionizing them. Latent forces of capitalist production reach the extreme contradictions and dehumanizing situation of the proletariat. Then, the working-class consciousness is formed, which is the precondition for the communist revolution. Contradictions, injustice, and inhumanity are overcome, and humanity is united.
Primitive society was a hunter-gatherer society because the instruments were rudimentary. Then, other instruments were discovered, and it became a sedentary agricultural society with new relations of production. Upon discovering the forge, feudalism developed, with a division between servants and masters. When machines were invented, the bourgeois revolution destroyed feudalism, and capitalist society was created. In this society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are at loggerheads. The worker produces a value that he does not perceive; he is exploited and alienated, and man becomes poorer in the proletariat.
Under communism, workers rise against the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat will produce a revolution. Then there will be a dictatorship of the proletariat in which they have all the power. Private property and the division of labor will be abolished, and all means of production will be common. The state will disappear, there will be voluntary collaboration of physical labor, and alienation will not exist. From there, true history will begin, with the goal of the realm of freedom beginning where work is determined by necessity, beyond material production.