Some thoughts on Karl Marx.

 

As Marx said himself, he didn't invent 'social classes' or the 'class struggle' because that can be found in the writings of the ancient Greeks like Aristotle and Plato. Marx's genius was that he was able to knock these various different ideas - French politics, German and Greek philosophy and English economics, into a coherent philosophy.

It was Marx's belief that material conditions determine consciousness. As I understand it, what Marx is saying is that the way in which a society organises its economic system - its infrastructure - determines the type of social relations that exist in that society and also its 'superstructure' i.e. its legal, political, and cultural system. There seems to be a great deal to be said in favour of this. The ancient world had slaves, the feudal world had serfs, and capitalism created a proletariat. All these societies also had ruling classes who organised things to maintain the status quo. As Marx said, the history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of class struggle. For Marx this is what drove social change.

What is problematic about Marx's philosophy is the belief that somehow history follows inevitable laws of social development. There seems to be little room for agency or spontaneity. If Lenin, hadn't arrived in Petrograd in April 1917, there may well have been no October revolution. Marx didn't rule out a Russian revolution in spite of the fact that it wasn't really a capitalist society but largely a feudal society. He seems to have thought that a revolution in Russian wouldn't be sustainable without the support of other European socialist countries. Contrary to Marx's predictions, most revolutions have occurred in peasant societies and not capitalist societies.

Is it also the case that materialist conditions determine consciousness? What really comes first - the infrastructure or the superstructure or do the two things interact?  There doesn't seem to be a great deal of evidence that there was a sudden change in the way in which the economy was organised in Biblical Palestine when Judeo Christianity arrived on the scene or the Renaissance in medieval Florence. Similarly, the way in which the ancient Greek world was organised doesn't seem to have changed much throughout the centuries even though it's a period when great thinkers and ideas flourished.