Recently, more and more people around the world are interested in Marxism. The system of views on society, politics and the economy developed by Marx, Engels and Lenin, of course, contains some contradictions. But at the same time it is distinguished by sufficient harmony and logical justification.
The Three Sources of Marxism
Marxism is a system of socio-political, economic and philosophical views, first set forth by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and subsequently developed by Vladimir Lenin. Classical Marxism is a scientific theory about the revolutionary transformation of social reality, about the objective laws of the development of society.
The theory of Marx did not arise from scratch. The sources of Marxism were classical German philosophy, English political economy and French utopian socialism. Taking all the most valuable from these currents, Marx and his closest friend and comrade-in-arms Engels managed to create a doctrine, the consistency and completeness of which is even recognized by ardent opponents of Marxism. Marxism combines a materialistic understanding of society and nature with the revolutionary theory of scientific communism.
Philosophy of marxism
Marx's views evolved under the influence of Feuerbach's materialistic philosophy and Hegel's idealistic logic. The founder of the new theory managed to overcome the limited views of Feuerbach, his excessive contemplation and underestimation of the significance of the political struggle. In addition, Marx reacted negatively to the metaphysical views of Feuerbach, who did not recognize the development of the world.
To the materialistic understanding of nature and society, Marx added Hegel's dialectical method, cleansing it of idealistic husks. The contours of a new trend in philosophy, called the dialectical materialism, gradually emerged.
Marx and Engels subsequently extended the dialectics to history and other social sciences.
In Marxism, the question of the relation of thinking to being is resolved unambiguously from materialistic positions. In other words, being and matter are primary, and consciousness and thinking are only a function of specially organized matter, which is at the highest stage of its development. The philosophy of Marxism denies the existence of a higher divine essence, no matter what clothes the idealists wear.
Political Economy of Marxism
The main work of Marx, Capital, is devoted to economic issues. In this essay, the author creatively applied the dialectical method and the materialistic conception of the historical process to the study of the capitalist mode of production. Having discovered the laws of the development of a society based on capital, Marx convincingly proved that the collapse of capitalist society and its replacement with communism is inevitability and objective necessity.
Marx studied in detail the basic economic concepts and phenomena inherent in the capitalist mode of production, including the concepts of commodity, money, exchange, rent, capital, surplus value. Such in-depth analysis allowed Marx to draw a number of conclusions that are of value not only for those who are attracted to the ideas of building a classless society, but also for modern entrepreneurs, many of whom learn to manage their capital using the book of Marx as a tool.
