Political Science & International Relations

By: TEAM EXAMVAT

MARXISM

MARXISM

ORTHODOX NEO MARX

MARX (Gramsci)

FRANKFURT STRUCTURAL
LENIN, MAO, MARX
SCHOOL
LUXEMBURG (Althuser)
(Marcuse)

KARL MARX

• German, 1818 -1883.

• Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and
children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with
German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings.
• His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.
• Marxism, hold that human societies develop through class conflict
• In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling
classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working
classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour-power in
return for wages
• Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that capitalism
produced internal tensions like previous socioeconomic systems and that those would lead to its
self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as the socialist mode of production.
Historical Materialism: Marx's theory of history locates historical change in the rise of class
societies and the way humans labour together to make their livelihoods. Marx argues that the
introduction of new technologies and new ways of doing things to improve production eventually
lead to new social classes which in turn result in political crises which can threaten the established
order.

• He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that one needed to
set it upon its feet
• Engels clarified: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in
a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes.
• Marx considered recurring class conflicts as the driving force of human history as such conflicts
have manifested themselves as distinct transitional stages of development in Western Europe.
• Accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of development in
relations of production:
1. Primitive communism: co-operative tribal societies.
2. Slave society: development of tribal to city-state in which aristocracy is born.
3. Feudalism: aristocrats are the ruling class while merchants evolve into the bourgeoisie.
4. Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the proletariat.
• For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone
nature—would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their
conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society
constituted by a free association of producers.
• the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism
and bring about socio-economic emancipation.
• In Communist Manifesto he proclaims "A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of
communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre"
• the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the
"Mature Marx"/ “Old Marx” is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.\
• It assumes that the form of economic organization, or mode of production, influences all other
social phenomena including wider social relations, political institutions, legal systems, cultural
systems, aesthetics and ideologies. These social relations, together with the economic system,
form a base and superstructure.
• As forces of production (i.e. technology) improve, existing forms of organizing production
become obsolete and hinder further progress, Then begins an era of social revolution."
• These inefficiencies manifest themselves as social contradictions in society which are, in turn,
fought out at the level of class struggle.
• this struggle materializes between the minority who own the means of production (the
bourgeoisie) and the vast majority of the population who produce goods and services (the
proletariat). Starting with the conjectural premise that social change occurs as result of the
struggle between different classes within society who contradict one another, a Marxist would
conclude that capitalism exploits and oppresses the proletariat, therefore capitalism will
inevitably lead to a proletarian revolution.
• In a socialist society, private property—as the means of production—would be replaced by co-
operative ownership. A socialist economy would not base production on the creation of private
profits, but on the criteria of satisfying human needs—that is, production for use.
Criticism of Capitalism

• Marx believed that the capitalist bourgeoisie and their economists were promoting what he saw as
the lie that "the interests of the capitalist and of the worker are ... one and the same.
• Exploitation is a matter of surplus labour—the amount of labour performed beyond what is
received in goods.
• The power of one social class to control the means of production enables its exploitation of other
classes. Under capitalism, the labour theory of value is the operative concern, whereby the
value of a commodity equals the socially necessary labour time required to produce it.
• Alienation (German: Entfremdung) is the estrangement of people from their humanity, and a
systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to employers,
who expropriate the surplus created by others and so generate alienated labourers.
Social Classes

• Marx identified the social stratification of the capitalist mode of production with the
following social groups:
1. Proletariat: The class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of
their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.
Lumpenproletariat: the outcasts of society, such as the criminals, vagabonds,
beggars, or prostitutes, without any political or class consciousness. Having no
interest in national, let alone international, economic affairs, Marx claimed that this
specific sub-division of the proletariat would play no part in the eventual social
revolution.
2. Bourgeoisie: those who "own the means of production" and buy labour power from the
proletariat, thus exploiting the proletariat.
Petite bourgeoisie: those who work and can afford to buy little labour power (i.e.
small business owners, peasants landlords and trade workers). Marxism predicts that
the continual reinvention of the means of production eventually would destroy the
petite bourgeoisie, degrading them from the middle class to the proletariat.
3. Landlords: a historically important social class who retain some wealth and power.
4. Peasantry and farmers: a scattered class incapable of organizing and effecting socio-
economic change, most of whom would enter the proletariat while some would become
landlords.
Class consciousness denotes the awareness—of itself and the social world—that a social class possesses
as well as its capacity to rationally act in their best interests. Class consciousness is required before a
social class can effect a successful revolution and thus the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Through working class revolution, the state (which Marxists saw as a weapon for the subjugation of one
class by another) is seized and used to suppress the hitherto ruling class of capitalists and (by
implementing a commonly owned, democratically controlled workplace) create the society of
communism which Marxists see as true democracy.
Communism: Last stage of Marxism/Socialism, where a “Stateless Society” will be established.

LIST OF BOOKS
1. The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature (doctoral thesis)
1841
2. The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law, 1842
3. Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843
4. On the Jewish Question, 1843
5. Notes on James Mill, 1844
6. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 1844
7. The Holy Family, 1845
8. Theses on Feuerbach, 1845
9. The German Ideology, 1845
10. The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
11. Wage Labour and Capital, 1847
12. Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
13. The Class Struggles in France, 1850
14. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852
15. Grundrisse (Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy), 1857
16. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859
17. Writings on the U.S. Civil War, 1861
18. Theories of Surplus Value, (posthumously published by Kautsky) 3 volumes, 1862
19. Value, Price and Profit, 1865
20. Capital. Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy The Process of Production of Capital
(Das Kapital), 1867
21. The Civil War in France, 1871
22. Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875
23. Notes on Adolph Wagner, 1883
24. Das Kapital, Volume II (posthumously published by Engels), 1885
25. Das Kapital, Volume III (posthumously published by Engels), 1894

ORTHODOX MARXISM

• Soviet Marxism
• Based on “Mature Marx”, communist manifesto, dialectical materialism, class struggle.
LENIN

• 1870-1924
• Marxism was meant for developed Capitalist Societies, but Lenin introduced it in a “Peasantry
Society”.
• Marx was against “Communist Party”, and favoured “spontaneous revolution”.
• Marx was against Intellectuals, Lenin incorporated them,
• Lenin: “Imperialism-The highest stage of Capitalism”
• Marxist-Leninist ideas/ Leninism- termed by Martov in 1904,
• Three stages of the evolution of Capitalism by Lenin:
1. Mercantile Capitalism
2. Industrial Capitalism
3. Finance Capitalism
• Formed “Communist International” /Comitern.
• Leninism is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that
proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard
party, as the political prelude to the establishment of communism.

MAO ZEDONG

• 1893-1976
• was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founding father of the People's Republic of
China (PRC)
• his theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism.
• Mao helped to found the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army
• If Marxism is against Capitalism, Maoism is against Feudalism and Imperialism
• Unlike Marx, he is not against Nationalism.
• Mao modified Marx concepts of dialectics into two parts:
1. Antagonistic Contradictions: Contradictions which can be resolved (eg: Peasantry)
2. Non-Antagonistic Contradictions: Which can’t be resolved.(B/w people and Bourgeoisie)
• Supports the concept of “Permanent Revolution”.
• “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend” campaign 1956
• “Cultural Revolution” in China- 1976
• Book: On Revolution and War
• The Red Book (gave strategy of “guerilla warfare”)
• All Political Power comes from the barrel of a gun.
• The weeds of socialism are better than the crops of capitalism
• Morality begins at the point of a gun.

ROSA LUXEMBURG

• 1871 -1919
• Contemporary and critique of Lenin
• Wanted the way proposed by Marx
 • The Accumulation of Capital- 1913
• The Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation was the central feature of Luxemburg's political
philosophy, wherein spontaneity is a grassroots approach to organising a party-oriented class
struggle. She argued that spontaneity and organisation, are not separable or separate activities, but
different moments of one political process as one does not exist without the other. These beliefs
arose from her view that class struggle evolves from an elementary, spontaneous state to a higher
level.
• According to Luxemburg, the Bolsheviks' strategic mistakes created tremendous dangers for the
Revolution such as its bureaucratisation.
• Bolshevik theorists such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky responded to this criticism by
arguing that Luxemburg's notions were classical Marxist ones, but they could not be applied to
Russia of 1917.
• Despite the criticism, Lenin praised Luxemburg after her death as an "eagle" of the working
class.
• Quotes: "Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters".
• The capitalist state of society is doubtless a historic necessity, but so also is the revolt of the
working class against it – the revolt of its gravediggers.
• BOOKS:
1. In Defense of Nationality
2. Social Reform or Revolution?
3. The Russian Revolution 1918
4. The Russian Tragedy

NEO MARXISM

• Neo-Marxism is a Marxist school of thought encompassing 20th-century approaches that amend

or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, typically by incorporating elements.
• Neo-Marxism comes under the broader framework of the New Left. In a sociological sense, neo-
Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and
power, to Marxist philosophy.
• The terms "neo-Marxian", "post-Marxian", and "radical political economics" were first used to
refer to a distinct tradition of economic theory in the 1970s and 1980s that stems from Marxian
economic thought.
GRAMSCI

• 1891-1937
• He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was
imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime.
• His Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political
theory.
• Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and
ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist
societies.
 • The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology, rather than
violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms
so that they become the "common sense" values of all and thus maintain the status quo.
• This cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the
institutions that form the superstructure.
• Gramsci also attempted to break from the economic determinism of traditional Marxist
thought.
• He held a humanistic understanding of Marxism, seeing it as a "philosophy of praxis" and an
"absolute historicism" that transcends traditional materialism and traditional idealism.

FRANKFURT SCHOOL/CRITICAL SCHOOL

• Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of

social organization, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing
the social development of a society and a nation.
• Focused on Young Marx (alienation)
• The School's sociologic works derived from syntheses of the thematically pertinent works of
Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx, of Sigmund Freud and Max
Weber, and of Georg Simmel and Georg Lukács
• Their emphasis on the critical component of social theory derived from their attempts to
overcome the ideological limitations of positivism, materialism, and determinism by returning to
the critical philosophy of Kant and his successors in German idealism – principally the
philosophy of Hegel, which emphasized dialectic and contradiction as intellectual properties
inherent to the human grasp of material reality.
• They are critical of “science”, as it promote a specific type of rationality, “instrumental
rationality”.
• Since the 1960s, the critical-theory work of the Institute for Social Research has been guided by
Jürgen Habermas's work in communicative rationality.
• Against Consumerism

CRITICAL THEORY

• The works of the Frankfurt School are understood in the context of the intellectual and practical
objectives of critical theory.
• In Traditional and Critical Theory (1937), Max Horkheimer defined critical theory as social
critique meant to effect sociologic change and realize intellectual emancipation, by way of
enlightenment that is not dogmatic in its assumptions.
• Critical theory analyzes the true significance of the ruling understandings (the dominant ideology)
generated in bourgeois society in order to show that the dominant ideology misrepresents how
human relations occur in the real world and how capitalism justifies and legitimates the
domination of people.
• Critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and
critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures.
• Chief exponent of Critical School:
HERBERT MARCUSE

• associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

• he criticized the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the book Soviet
Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958)
• some consider him "the Father of the New Left"
• His best known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964)
• Marcuse's 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance", in which he claimed capitalist democracies can
have totalitarian aspects, has been criticized by conservatives.
• Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of
the men and women who could change the world."

• BOOKS
1. Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932)
2. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941)
3. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955)
4. Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958)
5. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964)
6. A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) Essay "Repressive Tolerance,"
7. Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968)
8. An Essay on Liberation (1969)
9. Five Lectures (1969)
10. Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972)
11. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics

STRUCTURAL MARXISM

• primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser.
• Other proponents of structural Marxism were the sociologist Nicos Poulantzas and the
anthropologist Maurice Godelier.
• Althusser stressed that Marxism was a science that examined objective structures.
• Structuralist Marxism disputes the instrumentalist view that the state can be viewed as the direct
servant of the capitalist or ruling class.
• the structuralist position is that state institutions must function so as to ensure the viability of
capitalism more generally. In other words, state institutions must reproduce capitalist society as a
whole.
• instrumentalist Ralph Miliband and structuralist Nicos Poulantzas
• Ideas of Althusser:
1. Epistemological break: He fiercely condemns various interpretations of Marx's works—
historicism, idealism and economism—on grounds that they fail to realize that with the
"science of history", historical materialism, Marx has constructed a revolutionary view of
social change. Althusser believes these errors result from the notion that Marx's entire body
of work can be understood as a coherent whole. Rather, Marx's thought contains a radical
"epistemological break".
 This break represents a shift in Marx's work to a fundamentally different
"problematic", i.e., a different set of central propositions and questions posed, a
different theoretical framework.

2. Overdetermination: Overdetermination occurs when a single-observed effect is determined

by multiple causes, any one of which alone would be sufficient to account for ("determine")
the effect. That is, there are more causes present than are necessary to cause the effect.
this means that more evidence is available than is necessary to justify a conclusion.
Overdetermination is in contrast to underdetermination, when the number or strength
of causes is insufficient.

3. Ideological state apparatuses: Because Althusser held that a person's desires, choices,
intentions, preferences, judgements, and so forth are the effects of social practices, he
believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image.
Social practices both determine the characteristics of the individual and give them an idea of
the range of properties they can have, and of the limits of each individual. Althusser argues
that many of our roles and activities are given to us by social practice.
Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called "ideological state
apparatuses" (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organizations, and most
importantly in capitalist societies, the education system, as well as the received ideas that
they propagate. No single ISA produces in us the belief that we are self-conscious agents.
Instead, we derive this belief in the course of learning what it is to be a daughter, a
schoolchild, black, a steelworker, a councillor, and so forth.

4. Aleatory materialism : is a philosophy of history that, unlike historical materialism, takes

the concept of chance into account. In fragmentary texts and interviews, Althusser argues that
history is not a necessary process, in the sense that Marxism has always claimed, but the
result of a series of accidental encounters.

MARXISM in INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

• Marxism is the only theoretical perspective in IR that is named after a person.

• The first application of Marxist ideas to explain international processes was by communists and
revolutionaries of the early twentieth century such as Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding and
Vladimir Lenin.
• In 1974, Immanuel Wallerstein developed ‘world systems theory’ to incorporate the changes
of the late twentieth century.
• World-system" refers to the inter-regional and transnational division of labor, which divides the
world into core countries, semi-periphery countries, and the periphery countries.
• Core countries focus on higher skill, capital-intensive production, and the rest of the world
focuses on low-skill, labor-intensive production and extraction of raw materials.
• This constantly reinforces the dominance of the core countries. Nonetheless, the system has
dynamic characteristics, in part as a result of revolutions in transport technology, and individual
states can gain or lose their core (semi-periphery, periphery) status over time.
• Influenced by Dependency theory of A.G.Frank.
• While accepting world inequality, the world market and imperialism as fundamental features of
historical capitalism, Wallerstein broke with orthodox dependency theory's central proposition.
For Wallerstein, core countries do not exploit poor countries for two basic reasons:
1. Firstly, core capitalists exploit workers in all zones of the capitalist world economy (not just
the periphery)
2. core states do not exploit poor states, as dependency theory proposes, because capitalism is
organised around an inter-regional and transnational division of labor rather than an
international division of labour. During the Industrial Revolution, for example, English
capitalists exploited slaves (unfree workers) in the cotton zones of the American South, a
peripheral region within a semiperipheral country, United States.
• Core States: Trade dominance, productivity dominance, financial dominance followed by military
dominance.
• Peripheral states: weak, less developed, social inequality, etc
• Semi-Peripheral states: Mid way between the bo