At the invitation of Tehran Hopkins Club, Mr. Raha Amiri, PhD student in sociology at Allameh Tabatabaii University, delivered a lecture on Marxism on February the 6th (Bahman the 8th), which was attended by the regular members of the Club and was followed by the audience's questions. Next lectures are later to be delivered on the philosophers after Marx, the Frankfort School and New Marxism.
Regarding different aspects of Marx theory, there are different contributions to Marx's ideas which are at times paradoxical. Is Marx a revolutionary? Is he a scientist? As a scientist, does he believe in determinism? Does he believe in human potential and emancipation? In human potential which actualizes itself? Or in a structure which determines it? Some of his followers believe in structure and some in human potential. In his early works, he emphasizes more on human potential while in his later works he emphasizes the structure more. This is not paradoxical though; rather, it's a pattern of analyzing the reality which has extended through his life.
Marx's special view on historical materialism is based on Hegel's Idealism and Feuerbach's Materialism. According to Feuerbach, any knowledge or consciousness is based on material which is referred to as "mechanical materialism". On the contrary, Hegel believes that the objective aspect of the real world is based on "idea". Marx's special historical materialism holds that the objective aspect of the world conditions our knowledge instead of creating it. Determinacy conditions human social life as the most important, but not the first and last, factor. In Capital Marx wrote: "Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past; the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living". In Marx's dialectical procedure there is a connection between human potential and structure. In Capital II he writes: "What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality". There is a great structure which determines our knowledge and conditions it. There is a subject and an object, mind and material, and they together make reality. According to Marx, there is not a certain, clear gap between fact and value, object and subject, past and future. They are related and it is through this duality that future is formed, a future that is not absolutely determined by the past because the subject's reactions to its conditions are not predictable, but the subject makes the future under the conditions of the material world and the structure.
Marx's notion was based on history, on different periods of time according to which there is an evolutionary procedure from slavery to feudalism, a "happened procedure" from feudalism to capitalism, and a revolutionary procedure from capitalism to socialism. According to Marx, socialism is an introduction to communism. Marx believes that the difference between different historical periods originates from the different relations between object and subject in those eras, and what relates human potential to the material is labour. These differences cause the grand differences of history. In each period of time, there is a different kind of relation between human potential and structure. What is most important in this relation according to Marx is "activity;" this activity is displayed through work and it relates human potential to material. Human potential through activity gets engaged with the material world to make something by which it can survive.
In primitive communism, people would work on their own to provide their needs and to survive. They would exchange commodity for commodity, after that life got too complicated that it was impossible for human to work and survive on his own, so division of work happened. People would exchange commodity for money with which they could get the commodity they needed. After that, in capitalism there is reification; production is no more important as a means for survival, what is important is money. People both produce and consume for the sake of money which is the first and most important element in human life. Commodity turns into some means for getting more and more money. Use-value—the extra money that the owner of means of production—machinery, labour-force, etc.—is gained by exploiting the labour-force.
There is a distortion in the production mode in the capitalist era, people would not work only for their own sake but for the "surplus value" that the owner of the production gains. People do not load their human potential on their own real life but on the surplus value; therefore, they will be alienated from their real life. "Alienation" happens by the division of work after reification: Firstly, people will be alienated from the object they produce. Secondly, they will be alienated from the production mode where they are no more important. They are just a part of production ordered by the owner. And finally, they will be alienated from their fellow workers, from everything. They lose their consciousness which is now replaced by "ideology"—the superstructure determined by the economical base and the owners—which as the main means of exploitation keeps the proletarian mind unaware and unconscious of themselves and their production.
According to Marx, the change from capitalism to socialism should be a revolutionary one: It is when ideology is replaced by the real consciousness of class situation. By this awareness people would get engaged in class conflict and change their situation. Marx predicted that after capitalism especially in England and Eastern Europe, socialism would precondition the society for Communism.
In the capitalist society, there is the great population of workers and the minor group of owners. Workers get as much payment as is enough only for their survival. They are not able to buy the commodity they produce, then the surplus value will decrease and the procedure of production will confront collapse. This dialectic between human potential and the structure will end in socialism by means of "revolution". Then the proletarian dictatorship would continue for a period of time until it is replaced by Communism. People through revolution would reach emancipation in Communism; that is, they are conscious and have the means of production, and their consciousness will not be shaped by the ideology of the owners. They would load their human potential on their own real life.
Marx believed in some necessary preconditions before this shift from capitalism to socialism and then to communism. One of these preconditions is the modern equipment for production, high level technology, most important of all, people's consciousness. If these preconditions do not exist, there must be other ways to reach socialism. Marx believes neither in determinacy nor in human potential as the absolute determinant factor. He believes in human's critical role in changing the historical eras, from capitalism to socialism through revolution under the conditions of its economic base.
Fatemeh Ghazinejad