Why do people reject marxism

However, the success of the implementation of the Marxist social project in such dependence on the maturity moral, theoretical, political, strong-willed of the performers that a return to the practice of communism in the foreseeable future, in our opinion, is not expected. Anyhow, when we discuss the foreseeable communist perspective, we proceed voluntarily or involuntarily from recognizing the existing social conditions of life as sustainable so that we tend to consider them practically eternal.

However, one ought to bear in mind that the development of society is carried out not only linearly, but also synergistically. In addition, the reasons for the planetary scale may demand it as a universal need, making it impossible at least in a single country.

She is a Mathematician, System Programmer. His research works are in Religious studies, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of culture. He was a candidate in Social Philosophy. Krasheninnikova, in she defended her thesis.

In his scientific activities, he develops problems of business ethics and the functioning of the individual in the virtual world, Candidate of Sociology, Associate Professor, Kazan State Power Engineering University, Russian Federation.

He is a historian. He got an Academic degree in philosophical sciences. AS, HH Ulumuna, 20 1 , pp. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Sage, London, England. Herald ofthe Russian Academy of Sciences, 88 6 , pp. Retrieved, Wittgenstein, Marx, and Critical Theory. Journal of Language and Literature. Journal of history culture and art research, 6 4 , pp. Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism. Volume Publishing House of Political Literature. Manifesto of the Communist Party.

MARX, K Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Oxford University Press. Capital: Criticism of Political Economy. Still, he commanded respect. His hair was black; his eyes were black; his complexion was swarthy. In private, he was modest and gracious. When he was not sick—he had a bad liver, suffered from bronchitis, and grew fist-size boils, which Sperber thinks were caused by an autoimmune disorder but which may have been a symptom of his liver disease—he was playful and affectionate.

He loved Shakespeare, made up stories for his three daughters, and enjoyed cheap cigars and red wine. His wife and daughters adored him. He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, also from Trier, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-two. Sperber thinks that a fairy tale has grown up about the marriage, but Jenny is said to have been exceptionally beautiful, and she was devoted to Karl. He wrote passionate love poetry for her. The engagement lasted seven years, during which he finished his studies, and they rarely saw each other.

The relationship was mainly epistolary. Sperber believes that they had premarital sex. I certainly hope so. The one possible flaw in the domestic idyll has to do with a child born to their servant, Helene Demuth. Almost all women in nineteenth-century Britain who could manage to retain a servant did so. Engels claimed paternity. This was not implausible. Engels was unmarried and had a taste for working-class women; his longtime lover, Mary Burns, worked in a Manchester factory.

It is sympathy for Marx that leads Sperber and Stedman Jones to insist that we read him in his nineteenth-century context, because they hope to distance him from the interpretation of his work made after his death by people like Karl Kautsky, who was his chief German-language exponent; Georgi Plekhanov, his chief Russian exponent; and, most influentially, Engels.

The word the twentieth century coined for that was totalitarianism. His faith. But it was. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker: he wanted a world that is rational and transparent, and in which human beings have been liberated from the control of external forces. Hegel argued that history was the progress of humanity toward true freedom, by which he meant self-mastery and self-understanding, seeing the world without illusions—illusions that we ourselves have created.

This is what Feuerbach wrote about. We created God, and then pretended that God created us. We are supplicants to our own fiction. Concepts like God are not errors. History is rational: we make the world the way we do for a reason. We invented God because God solved certain problems for us.

But, once a concept begins impeding our progress toward self-mastery, it must be criticized and transcended, left behind. Otherwise, like the members of the Islamic State today, we become the tools of our Tool. Marx was a philosopher.

Marx liked to say that when he read Hegel he found philosophy standing on its head, so he turned it over and placed it on its feet. Life is doing, not thinking. It is not enough to be the masters of our armchairs. The cost, however, is a system in which one class of human beings, the property owners in Marxian terms, the bourgeoisie , exploits another class, the workers the proletariat. They do it because competition demands it.

Marx was a humanist. He believed that we are beings who transform the world around us in order to produce objects for the benefit of all. That is our essence as a species. Capitalism is fated to self-destruct, just as all previous economic systems have self-destructed. Marx was fanatically committed to finding empirical corroboration for his theory. It was a heroic attempt to show that reality aligned with theory. Marx had very little to say about how the business of life would be conducted in a communist society, and this turned out to be a serious problem for regimes trying to put communism into practice.

He had reasons for being vague. Marx was clearer about what a communist society would not have. The state, in the form of the Party, proved to be one bourgeois concept that twentieth-century Communist regimes found impossible to transcend. Communism is not a religion; it truly is, as anti-Communists used say about it, godless. But the Party functions in the way that Feuerbach said God functions in Christianity, as a mysterious and implacable external power.

Marx did not, however, provide much guidance for how a society would operate without property or classes or a state. A good example of the problem is his criticism of the division of labor. Rather than have a single worker make one pin at a time, Smith argued, a pin factory can split the job into eighteen separate operations, starting with drawing out the wire and ending with the packaging, and increase production by a factor of thousands. But Marx considered the division of labor one of the evils of modern life.

So did Hegel. It makes workers cogs in a machine and deprives them of any connection with the product of their labor. Human beings are naturally creative and sociable. A system that treats them as mechanical monads is inhumane. But the question is, How would a society without a division of labor produce sufficient goods to survive? Nobody will want to rear the cattle or clean the barn ; everyone will want to be the critic.

Believe me. Democracy in the parliamentary shell hides its absence in the state bureaucratic kernel; parliamentary freedom is regarded as the political counterpart of the freedom in the marketplace, and the hierarchical bureaucracy as the counterpart of the capitalist division of labor in the factory.

O'Connor, , p. There are some Marxists who would say that this is really the Marxist-Leninist view of representative democracy, not of Marxists in general. Be that as it may, the point for now is that this analysis is often accepted as "the" Marxist view by new Marxists, and is identified as such by O'Connor in the passage quoted above. I think it is a crucial point to consider because the idea that liberal freedoms are really a thin veil for the repression of the working class, when combined with the idea that the market is inherently exploitative, generates a contempt for liberal values and democracy that leads to crucial misunderstandings of the United States.

It says that representative democracy is all a sham. I think this may be one of the root problems of Marxist politics in the United States, a problem that makes it difficult for Marxists to join into coalitions with liberals.

For those Marxists who see representative democracy as a sham, the solution is "direct democracy," meaning small face-to-face groups in which the people themselves, not elected representatives, make decisions. This is in fact the meaning of the term "soviet. Problems also developed within direct democracy groups, often called "participatory democracy groups," in the New Left and women's movements in the s. Although they tried to foster open participation among equals, they developed informal power structures led by charismatic or unbending members.

There came to be a "tyranny of structurelessness" that shaped the group's decisions, often to the growing frustration of the more powerless members Ellis, , Chapter 6; Freeman, Based on this experience, it seems that selection of leaders through elections is necessary to avoid worse problems. Rather than downplaying the elected legislature, as some Marxists do, the Four Networks theory suggests that the creation of legislatures was a key factor in breaking down the unity of the monarchical state and thereby limiting its potential autonomy.

Put another way, representative democracy and legislatures are one of the few counterpoints to the great potential power of an autocratic state. They should not be dismissed as inevitable mystifications of class rule, even if empirical investigations show that legislatures in capitalist societies are often dominated by capitalists, as is generally the case in the United States.

The idea that Marxists and liberals should agree on is to extend the openness of legislatures in ways discussed in the Social Change section of this Web site. The planned economy envisioned by classical Marxists has not proved to be workable either in terms of productivity or democratic responsiveness.

There are several reasons for these failures. The productivity problem is rooted in the fact that the range and depth of information needed to run a complex consumer economy is too great for any planning bureaucracy. Moreover, no planning agency currently has the capability to analyze the information that does exist in a timely enough fashion to deal with sudden shifts in the availability of raw materials or changes in consumer preferences.

The result is an unproductive economy. As the planners and plant managers come under criticism, they start to cut corners and cheat in ways that can allow them to meet their quotas. The result is hoarding of raw materials that other plants need, and shoddy goods.

In other words, all the potential problems with large-scale bureaucracies come into play. Power accrues at the top. Then corruption ensues, such as placing friends and relatives of questionable competence in positions of responsibility, withholding important information from rival agencies, and skimming off resources for the personal benefit of the top officials.

All this adds to the morale problems generated by the failures of the economy and multiplies the large economic inefficiencies. The disappointing conclusion that emerges from the social sciences and history is that non-market planning cannot work, even in democratic societies.

Thus, progressives and other egalitarians have to develop methods of planning through the market in order to realize their egalitarian goals. For all its potential weaknesses, a planned market system within the context of a representative democracy can be both productive and more equal than present-day societies because it relies on many different people with small pieces of information to make small and limited decisions.

Many contemporary Marxists are rethinking these issues as well. There are interesting arguments about "market socialism" Elson, ; Ollman, Marxist politics, whether of the Social Democratic or Marxist-Leninist variety, have not been successful for a number of reasons.

The first two were discussed earlier in this critique. To repeat:. The most extreme expression of this last point was the slogan of the German Communist Party in the early s, "After Hitler comes us," which they used when they refused to enter into a coalition with the Social Democrats to stop the rise of Hitler.

As subsequent German history sadly proved, the "worse is better" theory drastically underestimates the power of political repression to destroy a left-wing movement. Much closer to home, the Communists in the United States played a central role in creating the Progressive Party in , even though they had insisted they were going to stay close to the labor unions within the Democratic Party.

But when Moscow decreed in October, , that all Communist parties must find ways to oppose the imperialistic Marshall Plan massive financial aid for Western European countries , the American Communists decided that aiding a third party would be the best approach.

Since they knew such a party could not win, and might cost the Democrats the election, it is likely that they were out to help the Republicans, whom they believed might reject the Marshall Plan because of their strong isolationist wing.