Marxism is summarized as having three main components: a philosophical basis drawn from German idealism, a systematic economic and political theory including the labor theory of value and surplus value, and a theory of revolution. Marx believed his economic theory provided a scientific answer to vague utopian ideas. He argued that profits come from the unpaid labor of workers, known as surplus value. As technology advances, the rate of surplus value and profits can increase despite workers' wages staying the same, through relative surplus value. Marx predicted that capitalism's internal contradictions would lead to its downfall through revolution as inequality and crises intensified. Later Marxist thinkers including Lenin, Mao, and Gramsci adapted Marxism to different contexts but it faces

1. MARXISM
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Shahzad Ahmed

2. The Term MARXISM
• has had various meanings since 1848
• Three parts
• a philosophical basis
• a systematic and complex set of economic and political theories - the most
important: The Theory of Surplus Value, and the Labour Theory of Value
• a theory of revolution

3. Three Roots of Marxian Theories
Three European traditions
• Philosophical base - German tradition
• the theories of political economy - 19c British economics
• the revolutionary theory - the French Revolution

4. Marxist Theory of Economics
• Marx called his theory of economics as scientific
• A fitting answer to vague and utopian ideals of better future world
• Classical British Economics
• David Ricardo (1772-1823), the great British economist, had
developed a labour theory of value.
• “The price of a commodity depends on the time it takes to make it”
• Marx saw this as commodity and value

5. What is commodity?
• "a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or
another".
• If it is of someone else it must be paid for either by exchange or by money
• Every commodity has a use value
• And an exchange value
• The use value is its purpose
• But exchange value is complex
• Analogy: pile of sand and platinum
• Marx went with Ricardo's Labour Theory of Value

6. The Means of production
• Tools, machines
• Develop
• Change
• A new piece would make the production twice
• The exchange value would fall by half then

7. • So the new machine may make workers redundant
• New looms and hand weavers
• The capitalists, the bourgeois did all that
• Redundant workers were employed in factories and mills
• Yet there arose the problem of profit
• If the owners of factories paid the workers the actual exchange value
of commodity
• They would have no profit, no new machines which reduce the cost
• Profit is the oxygen of capitalism

8. • Ordinary people don't own factories
• They only sell labour power
• Skilled workers sell more than unskilled ones
• Yet both are doing the same

9. The Production System
• Workers sell their labour for wages - they use it for food and shelter
• The working class - the Proletariat
Latin - Prole "lots of mouths to feed"

10. • A commodity comes from two means: the means of production and
labour
• Fixed profit: machines, raw materials comes from labour power
• Labour power has an exchange value: money to buy commodities and
to ensure new generation of workers
• "a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or
another".
• Variable Profit:

11. Variable Profit and Labour Exploitation
• Profit must come from variable profit
• Capitalistic exploitation is a must there
• Long hours of work in exchange of real rates of labour
• Theory of surplus value
• Fixed capital remains does not add value to the finished commodity

12. Absolute Surplus Value
• Absolute : determined by the number of hours a worker is made to
work
• The greater the number of hours, the larger the surplus value, the
greater the profit
• The quantity of surplus value can become larger but the rate at which
the quantity increases
• it is fixed

13. Relative surplus Value
• Capitalists tried to find new ways to increase the rate of surplus value
to produce more profit
• To do this workers are made to be more productive, not made to
work for longer hours
• By introducing new machinery, technology
• With the same capital
• More commodities are produced, fewer workers needed

14. • But advantage is temporary
• The competitor will adopt the same strategy
• The cycle goes on, resulting in more workers lose out
• In such conditions, Concentration of Capital
• Smaller business out
• Owners joining the proletariat
• Society becoming more polarized

15. Marx’s Prophecy: Downfall of Capitalism
• Revolution, intensifying crises
• Goods not purchasable, workers forced out of work,
• Enterprises would fall down, merged by bigger ones
• The law of capitalistic accumulation
• The law of the concentration
• And the law of increasing misery
• Would pave the way for the destruction of capitalism

16. Capitalism and its downfall
• The process of production has the seeds of revolution in it
• Class consciousness
• Two factors pave the way to class consciousness
• Objective reality: shared by a large class of workers in the same
position
• Subjective factors: an actual awareness of that shared condition and
the existence of another class with exploitative designs

17. Class alienation:
• class consciousness arises due to alienation
Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844
• Humans not in proper relation with other parts of their life
• Result: unhappy, dissatisfied
• Just illusion
• Alienation from product they produce, because they are not theirs
• Alienation from work, as they do it for someone else
• Alienation from each other, as capitalism pits worker against worker
as competitor

18. Russian Marxism
• Revolutionary thought began in 19th C
• Lenin being the key figure
• Peasantry was to be first revolutionary body
• Yet peasants wanted more and more land
• Not suitable for a revolutionary cause
• Industrial proletariat
• Those were the times when capitalism was popular in Russia

19. Lenin and Marxism
• 1917, the revolution took place
• Marxism – Leninism
• 20th C Capitalism had gone into its ‘highest stage’: Imperialism
• Capitalism depends on growth
• Needs more markets to avoid over-production – decline in profit
• Needs more and cheaper raw material

20. International Theory of Revolution
• Globalization – in its primary stages
• Concentration of capital – monopolies – cartels
• Divide of the world – ‘amicably’
• But when no further expansion
• Imperialism leads to war
• Colonists have to accept the new proletariat
• No progress beyond
• Revolution to follow

21. • ‘peace, land, bread’
• All power to the Soviets
• The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
• Lenin died in 1924
• Stalin took over

22. Stalin
• A brutal leader
• Equality was abandoned
• A class of party leaders lived in luxury
• Dictatorship of the proletariat passed to dictatorship of the party and
to dictatorship of the leader
• Comparable to Nazi regime
• Abolished ‘dialectic’
• CHEKA
• censorship

23. Marxism in the third world
• Mao Tse Tung (1883 – 1976)
• Fidel Castro (b. 1926)
• Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969)

24. Mao Zedong and Marxism
• 1948
• A new kind of Marxism – Maoism
• A complex thought – Chinese thought and culture
• The notion of Contradictions lie at the heart of Maoism
• Universal
• Particular
• Quite a different model from Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism

25. • permanent revolution
• represents a peasant type of Marxism, with a principally rural and
military outlook.
• The notion of contradiction is central to Mao’s thought
• Quite far from Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism

26. The Failure of Marxism
• Prophecy of ‘inevitable revolutions’ in industrialized countries of the
west proved wrong
• Affluent Middle class
• Existing communist countries – inhumanity – inefficiency
• ‘economic determinism’ proved wrong that only the proletariat is the
force to bring about revolution

27. Postmodernism and Marxism
• Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) confronted Fascism
• He elaborated the concept of hegemony which attempts to explain
not only why workers might not be revolutionary but why they could
turn Fascist.
• Gramsci's idea is that revolution can take place only if there is a
genuine alternative world view accepted by the widest range of
exploited groups.
• Gramsci's name is associated with the emergence of the "New Left" in
the 1960s, that is, modern Marxism.

28. The Frankfurt School
• common name given to the members of the Institute for Social
Research, founded in 1923 in Frankfurt, but which emigrated to New
York in 1933.
• T.W. Adorno (1903-69) (philosopher, sociologist and musicologist),
• Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) (essayist and literary critic),
• Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) (philosopher),
• Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) (philosopher and sociologist)
• later, the philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929).

29. Criticism of Marxism
1. Socialism does not work and neither does any other grand narrative.
The ideologies associated with them are always false.
2. Classes are degenerating and disappearing and attempts to explain
things in terms of them are reductionist and wrong. There are
many other significant sources of identity and conflict, such as
gender, ethnicity, sexual preference.

30. 3. The state as such is always dangerous and cannot deliver effective
social welfare; this can only be done by civil society.
4. Any form of central planning is inefficient and tends to corruption;
markets are the only mechanism which allows for fair
distribution.
5. The old left approach to politics always ends in authoritarian regimes
which crush civil society. Politics should exist only at the local
level, with local struggles over local issues.

31. 6. Conflicts (antagonisms) are inevitable and while some may be
resolved, this merely transforms and clears the ground for
further, newer antagonisms.
An overview of all conflicts and their eventual resolution is
impossible. All we can have are understandings of particular
situations at particular moments.

32. 7. This is a good thing, since the resolution of all conflicts would result
in a stale, rigid society. An ideal would be a pluralist democracy,
providing a stable framework for many local conflicts.
8. Revolutions either cannot happen or end badly. The alternative is
democratic transition.

33. 9. Solidarity can exist within and across a range of different groups, it is
a humanitarian gesture. A belief in class solidarity as the only valid form
of solidarity is harmful to this process.
10. In an interdependent, globalized world, anti-imperialism has had its
day. The world is too complex.

34. THANKS FOR YOUR TIME