Marxist Theory

Foundations

From the standpoint of historical materialism, a human being is understood as a thing realized through social action, principally acts embedded in and surrounding the production of material life. Human essence lies at the intersection of the totality of social relations in which individuals emerge as social beings. Dialectically, individuals collectively objectivate society through social action and, in turn, realize their humanity in the process. However, in segmented societies, especially those marked by social class, individuals become alienated from their essential activities, from the objects they bring into existence, and from others and themselves. For Marxists, the fundamental problem to explain and overcome in history is the fact that the majority has lost control over the act of creating the world and the world it created, a condition that denies “species-being”—that is, the power of self-activity and self-actualization. This problem focuses on both Marxist theory and political practice. Indeed, the political demand this approach entails is inseparable from the theory that explains it, which Marx envisioned in his youth as an epistemological position transcending the “is-ought” dichotomy that limits positivist thinking and liberal politics, both related expressions of bourgeois, or capitalist, idealism.

The solution to the problem of alienation, Marxists contend, is the achievement of substantive freedom for all members of society, which requires popular control over society's productive forces, a state of affairs requiring—and justifying—the revolutionary transformation of the existing conditions. Empowered, the proletariat, or working class, collectively shapes the direction of history. Thus, socialist revolution lays the foundation for a more just social order and a more complete humanity. Crucially, this standpoint conceptualizes freedom not in liberal terms of limited political democracy, which is necessarily constrained by the capitalist imperative to accumulate property and usurp wealth, what Erich Fromm calls “negative liberty,” but in the radical terms of economic democracy, or socialism—with communism, a stateless and classless social order of self-actualizing individuals, envisioned as the final goal.

The concrete character of work, the objects on which work is performed, and the instruments produced by and used in that work constitute the labor process that moves history. Objects of labor may be things producers find in nature or things already worked up by prior labor activity. Some of these objects become instruments of labor, such as tools and machines that concentrate a worker's activity on an object. The objects and instruments make up the means of production. Taken together, objects, instruments, and human labor power make up the forces of production, constituting the practical and technological basis of a given social formation.

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