Marxism

Marxism holds the suffering of the exploited to be a historical product of oppression, not an ordeal to be sanctified: religious consolation, the opium of the people, is only its veil. The point is not to give misery a meaning but to abolish it by overturning the social relations that engender it, emancipation being the end of avoidable suffering.

Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right · Marx, Capital

Marxism historicizes human nature: there is no fixed essence inherent in the individual, man is the product of social relations that change with modes of production. What we are is not a prior given but the transformable result of a material history.

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, VI · Marx and Engels, The German Ideology

Marxism resolutely privileges praxis: the truth of a thought is proven in practice, and philosophy is worth only what it does as a force of transformation. The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach disqualifies contemplative interpretation in favor of collective action directed at social change.

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, II and XI (1845)

The mainspring of historical change is located in a material contradiction: at a certain stage the productive forces come into conflict with the relations of production that constrain them, and that tension is resolved by a social, usually revolutionary, transformation. History thereby ceases to be a chaos of events or the work of great men: it obeys a discernible logic in which each mode of production (feudal, bourgeois, communist) prepares its own supersession. This turns against the idealism of history (that of Providence or of Spirit) an explanation drawn from economics, and grounds the forecast of a classless society not on a wish but on a "law of social motion."

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.The Communist Manifesto

Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, preface (1859) · Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

The argument begins from an analysis, not from indignation: the wage pays the value of labor power (what it costs to reproduce it), but the worker produces more than that, and this surplus, surplus value, is captured by the owner of the means of production. Exploitation is therefore not an abuse or a contingent injustice but the normal mechanism of profit, concealed beneath the appearance of a free and fair exchange of wages for work. This rejects both classical political economy, which took that exchange to be just, and market libertarianism: so long as private ownership of the means of production persists, formal equality masks a real domination that only a classless society can lift.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.Critique of the Gotha Programme

Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) · Marx, Capital, vol. I, on surplus value

If exploitation lies in the very structure of the relations of production, then reform can only manage it: only their overthrow abolishes it. Hence the revolutionary character of Marxist progressivism and its refusal of the alternatives: neither awaiting a moral evolution, nor the ideal cities of utopian socialism, nor mere philosophical critique will do, since to interpret the world leaves it intact. Thought itself has worth only as praxis, a moment of real transformation borne by the class that has "nothing to lose but its chains." Philosophy ceases to be contemplation and becomes a weapon, as the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach sums up.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.Theses on Feuerbach, XI (1845)

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, XI (1845) · Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

To start from the individual in order to explain society is to take for a starting point what is in fact a result: the "isolated, self-sufficient" individual of liberalism and the social contract is itself a late product of a given society, not its cause. Marx reverses the order of explanation: the human is understood from class and place in the relations of production, for the human essence has no seat in the individual but in the ensemble of social relations. This holism is not a collectivist preference but a thesis of method, aimed against the abstract individualism of political economy and natural right.

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, VI (1845) · Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse, 1857)

What defines a class is neither rank, nor income, nor a sense of belonging, but the objective place one holds in the relations of production: whether or not one owns the means of production, whether one sells or buys labor power. Social identity is thus not a choice or a label one adopts, but a material condition that precedes the awareness one has of it, and that can remain hidden until a class has constituted itself "for itself." This rejects both the naturalization of hierarchies and the liberal picture of a society of interchangeable individuals.

Marx, Manifesto; Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

The starting point is not an idea but a fact: humans must first produce their means of subsistence before they can think, pray, or legislate. From this Marx "inverts" Hegel's dialectic, in which Spirit unfolded itself in the world: it is not the idea that begets the real, but material activity that begets ideas. Law, religion, and philosophy become superstructures, reflections of the economic base and not first causes. The target is not only Hegel but every idealism that believes it can change the world by changing ideas: for Marx, that is to mistake the reflection for the source.

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845-1846) · Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888)

Labor is held to be the activity in which the human being objectifies and realizes himself: he imprints his mark on nature and recognizes himself in it. This is what makes the diagnosis so severe under capital: alienation is not mere drudgery or low pay but the turning of that activity against the one who performs it, along four dispossessions: of the product, which belongs to another and confronts him as an alien power; of the labor process, undergone rather than chosen; of his species-being, what makes the human a creative being; and of other people, reduced to competitors. Marxism thereby shifts the question of labor from reward to the very form of the activity: even well paid, wage labor remains crippling so long as the worker masters neither its end nor its process.

Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Estranged Labour" · Marx, Capital, vol. I

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness": there is no fixed human nature given outside history. Human character, values, and needs are shaped by social conditions and the mode of production, which anchors Marxism on the side of culturalism.

Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, preface (1859) · Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845-1846)

Marx's atheism does not stop at denying God: it asks why humans need one. Religion is neither a mere error nor a priestly imposture, but at once the expression of real distress and the protest against it, an imaginary consolation that relieves suffering while making it bearable, and so lasting. Hence the decisive shift: to criticize heaven is useless unless one criticizes earth, that is, the social relations that make religion necessary. Abolishing the illusion presupposes abolishing the conditions that call for it, which ranges Marxism on the side of atheist materialism.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1844

Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, introduction (1844)