{UAH} KARL MARX ON ECONOMICS: ATTENTION MOODY SENYONGO

 

 

 Mr Moody Senyongo,

You have made some rather very simplistic comments on Marxism and its views on economics. As I mentioned before, Dialectical Materialism, the theory on which much of Marxist theory is based, is a very complicated and complex subject, even for people like myself who have studied it for  a life time. Therefore, this is a brief idiots guide to Marx on Economics- it is very simplified I must say but gives you the basic outline of what the  ideology is all about and what Communists like myself aspire to achieve.

The first duty of all communists is to explain material reality to those who are unaware of them. The second is to prepare the people for action and revolution. Pease bear this in mind, and I am available to continue this dialogue if you wish to deepen your knowledge of the current financial crisis  engulfing the world capitalist system and wrecking grief and suffering in much of the underdeveloped world,  and the opportunities it gives to working people around the world, including Uganda.

For Karl Marx, the basic determining factor of human history is economics. According to him, humans — even from their earliest beginnings — are not motivated by grand ideas but instead by material concerns, like the need to eat and survive. This is the basic premise of a materialist view of history. At the beginning, people worked together in unity and it wasn't so bad.

But eventually, humans developed agriculture and the concept of private property.

These two facts created a division of labour and a separation of classes based upon power and wealth. This, in turn, created the social conflict which drives society.

All of this is made worse by capitalism which only increases the disparity between the wealthy classes and the labour classes. Confrontation between them is unavoidable because those classes are driven by historical forces beyond anyone's control.

Capitalism also creates one new misery: exploitation of surplus value.

For Marx, an ideal economic system would involve exchanges of equal value for equal value, where value is determined simply by the amount of work put into whatever is being produced. Capitalism interrupts this ideal by introducing a profit motive — a desire to produce an uneven exchange of lesser value for greater value. Profit is ultimately derived from the surplus value produced by workers in factories.

A labourer might produce enough value to feed his family in two hours of work, but he keeps at the job for a full day — in Marx's time, that might be 12 or 14 hours. Those extra hours represent the surplus value produced by the worker.

The owner of the factory did nothing to earn this, but exploits it nevertheless and keeps the difference as profit.

In this context, Communism thus has two goals: First it is supposed to explain these realities to people unaware of them; second it is supposed to call people in the labour classes to prepare for the confrontation and revolution.

This emphasis on action rather than mere philosophical musings is a crucial point in Marx's program. As he wrote in his famous Theses on Feuerbach : "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

 Society

Economics, then, are what constitute the base of all of human life and history — generating division of labour, class struggle, and all the social institutions which are supposed to maintain the status quo. Those social institutions are a superstructure built upon the base of economics, totally dependent upon material and economic realities but nothing else. All of the institutions which are prominent in our daily lives — marriage, church, government, arts, etc. — can only be truly understood when examined in relation to economic forces.

Marx had a special word for all of the work that goes into developing those institutions: ideology. The people working in those systems — developing art, theology, philosophy, etc. — imagine that their ideas come from a desire to achieve truth or beauty, but that is not ultimately true.

In reality, they are expressions of class interest and class conflict. They are reflections of an underlying need to maintain the status quo and preserve current economic realities. This isn't surprising — those in power have always wished to justify and maintain that power.