A History of Socialism: Part II

Today I’ll cover Marxism, or, as it is often called, Communism, but before I get to Marx, we have look at Hegel.  G.W.F. Hegel thought that history unfolded through a clash of ideas.  First we had a thesis, an idea held by most people as true.  This eventually gave rise to opposition, called the antithesis.  (If you read it as “anti-thesis, it becomes clear.)  The clash of these two ideas produces a sort of melding, which is the synthesis.  The synthesis soon becomes the new thesis, and the whole process starts again.  This thesis, antithesis, synthesis is called the dialectic, or the Hegelian dialectic.

Karl Marx said Hegel was correct in part, but what was clashing was not ideas, but economic systems.  The existing economic order was the thesis; a new economic system would provide the antithesis.  Marx called this dialectical materialism, because it related to material goods.

Economic systems, said Marx, are what drives everything else.  Governments exist to entrench the owners, religions justify the economic system, schools teach its inevitability.  To put this in more modern terms, “follow the money.”

Marx, writing in the mid-18th century, thought that the democracy as practiced in France, England, and the U.S. was a sham.  When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, voting in the U.S. was limited to white males, slavery was practiced, women were little better than chattel, Indians were slaughtered, child labor was a fact of life, and mules in the mines were treated better than miners.  Unions were illegal, and both parties were run by elites.

Marx called this democracy “bourgeois democracy.”  The mass of men and women had no power and no hope of getting any.  However, things would get better.  The workers (in Marxist lingo, the proletariat) would grow, the bourgeoisie (the owners) would shrink in numbers.  Eventually a revolution would occur, and all of the workers would run the government as a dictatorship.  Note, however, that a dictatorship of 95% is more democratic than a democracy of 5% of the population.

Marx also noted that with industrialization, for the first time in history everyone would have enough material goods for happiness.  Remember that governments exist to protect the rich.  If everyone is rich, government can wither away.  

This is getting too long, but I need to add a few things.  First, Marx underestimated human greed.  Secondly, somebody still needs to run the sewage treatment plant.  Third, what Lenin and Stalin did to Marxist thought was a travesty.  Finally, suppose we took the rights guaranteed by bourgeois democracy and used them to attain power without a revolution?  Could we do that?  That brings us to Eduard Bernstein in Part III.