A GOVERNMENT IS AN INHERENTLY EVIL INSTITUTION AND APPARATUS MEANT FOR THE OPPRESSION OF THE POOR.
Dialectic
contains different elements that are naturally antagonistic to one another. It
is similar to a compass or map which allows sociologists to get their bearing
in the turmoil of events and permits them to understand the underlying
processes that shape the world. Hegel called these the thesis and antithesis1.
According
to Sidney (1958) Marxism like Christianity has its bible, its council, its
schisms, its orthodoxies and heresies, its exegeses, profane and sacred. And
like Christianity, it has its mysteries of which the principal one is the
dialectic2.
The
dialectic is like an argument or a dialogue between elements that are locked
together. The word dialectic comes from the greek word dialektikos meaning discourse or discussion2. For
example to understand good you must at the same time understand bad. To
comprehend one you must understand the other. Good and bad are locked in
continual dialogue. Hegel argued that these kinds of conflicts would resolve
themselves into a new element or synthesis which in turn sets up a new
dialectic every synthesis contains a thesis that by definition has conflicting
elements. So in our example if you truly understand that good is defined by the
presence of bad-if the dialectic becomes active for you-then your comprehension
of the good/bad issues changes. After such an insight, it can never be the case
that good triumphs over evil, they are mutually dependent.
The
least significant aspect of Marx dialectical method is its division into
triadic phases. However, it is not so much the number of phases; a situation
has which makes it dialectical but a specific relation of opposition between
those phases which generates a succession of other phases. The necessary
condition of a dialectical situation is at least two phases, distinct but not
separate. The sufficient condition of a dialectical situation is given when
those two situation is given when those two phases present a relation of
opposition and interaction such that the results exhibit something qualitatively
new, preserves some of the structural elements of the interacting phases and
eliminate others3 (Sidney 1958).
Dialectical
materialism explain the laws of evolution, which sees the world not as a
complex ready-made thing, but as a complex of processes, which go through an
uninterrupted transformation of coming into being and passing away1
(Shaw 1978).
Materialism
acknowledges that the world is in a process of constant flux. Human beings are
a part of nature and evolved from lower forms of life to the present. Human
beings think and are conscious. The human brain alone is capable of producing
general ideas. For materialists, there is no consciousness a part from the
living brain which is part of a material body. Marxists do not deny that mind
consciousness, thought, will, feeling, sensation are real. While rooted in
material conditions, human beings generalize and think creatively. They in turn
change their material surroundings2 (Shaw 1978).
According
to Bien (1955), weber understood materialism as an attempt to deduce all
culture from economics…for likacs, it is a way of saying that all relation
among men are not the sum of personal acts or personal decisions, but pass
through things, the anonymous roles, the common situations and the institutions
where men have projects so much of themselves that their fate is now played out
outside them. As… the personal interests become self-contained in class
interests, the personal conduct of the individual reobjectifies itself,
necessarily alienates itself and at the same time exists without him as an
…independent force3.
In
his essay on dialectical and historical materialism, stain lists three
principal features of Marxists; that the world is by its very nature material,
that the multifold phenomenon of the world constitutes different forms of
matter in motion, and that the world develops in accordance wiith the laws of
movement of matter and therefore stands in no need of universal spirit to
explain it4.
According
to Gustav (1958), Marx liked the historical process implied in Hegel’s
dialectic but he disagreed with its ideational base. Marxists materialism
stands in opposition to Hegels idealism which regards the world as the
embodiment of any absolute idea a universal spirit of consciousness. Contrary
to idealism which asserts that only our minds really exists and that the
material world being, nature exists only in our mind in our sensation, ideas
and perception, the Marxists materialism holds that matter, nature being is an
objective reality existing outside and independent of our mind and that mind is
secondary derivative since it is a reflection of matter, a reflection of being1.
Marx
argues that human beings are unique because they creatively produce materials
to fill their own material needs. Since the defining feature of humanity is
production, not ideas and concepts, Marx found Hegel’s notion of idealism
false. The dialectic is oriented around material production and not ideas- the
material dialectic. Thus the dynamics of the historical dialectic are to be
found in the economic system with each economic system inherently containing antagonistic
elements. The dynamic or motor within the dialectic comes from the tensions
that must be resolved. As the antagonistic elements work themselves out, they
form a new economic system. According to Marx any society experiences internal
economic contradictions that lead to a push for a social change resulting into
a new economic system and social relations (Bottomore et al 1992).
According
to tucker (1978), Society is not like an organism that gradually and peacefully
becomes more complex in order to increase its survival chances, as outlined by
the functionalism. Rather society is filled with human beings who exercise
power to oppress and coerce others. Periods of apparent peace in the society
are simply times when the powerful are able to dominate the populace in an
efficient manner. However the suppressed become enabled and will eventually
overthrow and change the system. Social change in the society thus occurs
periodically and through social upheaval.
In
mapping out the past of historical dialectic, Marx categories five different
economic systems that is means of production along with their relations of
production- pre-class societies, Asiatic societies, ancient societies, feudal
societies, and capitalistic societies. Pre-class societies are like the hunters
and the gatherers. These were small groups of people with minimal division of
labor- what Marx termed as natural division of labor and communal ownership of
property. Ancient societies such as the Rome developed around large urban
centers. Private property and slave labor were replaced by feudal systems
wherein the primary economic forms was the serf labor tied to the land of the
aristocracy. Feudal systems were later replaced by capitalists systems. Hopefully
the capitalistic systems will be replaced by socialism and that in turn will be
replaced by communism. Marx argues that social changes come through structural
dynamics. It is the structural relations in society that bring change not
individual actions (tucker 1978).
According
to Marx, production involves three intertwined issues; the means of production
or the actual process of production, the social relationships that form because
of production and the end results of production that is the product (McClellan
1973).
According
to Shaw (1978), means of production are identified by Marx as the material
factors of production, the objective conditions of labor, and labor’s material
and means. Marc declares that both the instruments of labor and the objects of
labor are means of production. The relations of production are those relations
within which production is carried on. The process of production always and
necessarily involves men in some relations with each other and the means of
production. The actual relations within which production proceeds are
designated as the work relations of production that is the material, technical
relations which govern the actual labor process itself1.
In
classic feudalism for examples, people formed communities around a designated
piece of land and a central manor for provision and security. At the heart of
this local arrangement was a noble who had been granted the land from the king
in return for political support and military service. At the bottom of the
community hierarchy was the serf. The serf lived on and from the land and was
granted protection by the noble in return for service, feudalism was a
political and economic system that centered on land – land ownership was the
primary means of production. People were related to the land through oaths of
homage and fealty that is the fidelity of a feudal tenant to the lord. These
relations functioned somewhat like family roles and spelled out normative
obligations and rights. The way People related to each other under feudalism
was heavily influenced by that economic system and was quite different from the
way current societies related to one another under capitalism. The worker under
capitalism does not see the boss as a family.
According
to O’neill (1966); the evolution of human nature proceeds in terms of the
interaction between man, nature and the technology and social relations of
production which mediate that process. The potentiality of human nature may be
regarded as a function of the means and relations of production1.
Because
of the simple fact that every succeeding generation finds itself in possession
of the production forces won by the previous generation which serve it as the
raw materials for new production a connection a rises in human history, a
history of humanity takes shape which has become all the more a history of
humanity since the productive forces of man and therefore his social history of
men is never anything but the history of their individual development whether
they are conscious of it or not2 (O’Neill 1966).
The
capitalists lift economic work out of all other institutional forms. Under capitalism
the relationships we have with people in the economy are seen as distinctly
different from religious, familial or political relations. In the previous
economic system these relations overlapped for example in the agriculturally
based societies family and work coincided. Fathers worked at home and all
family members contributed to the work that was done. Capitalism lifted this
work away from the farm where work and workers were embedded in family and
places it in urban based factories. Capitalism separates the worker from his or
her social networks and makes labor a commodity (Tucker 1978).
According
to O’Neill (1966); under capitalism man is estranged from the product of his
work which in turn estranges him from his own nature as a sensuous and social
being. Under such circumstances the meaning of work becomes merely a means of
subsistence for the satisfaction of purely animal needs and loses its nature as
a human need which is to work creatively even in the absence of physical need.
According to Bien (1955); Marx says that capital is not a thing but rather a
social relationship between persons mediated by things. Historical materialism
is not the reduction of history to one of its sectors. It states a kinship
between the person and the exterior, between the subject object which is at the
bottom of the alienation of subject in the object and if the movement is reversed,
it will be the basis for the reintegration of the world with man.
According
to Cohen (1978), both Marx and Hegel see all relations of production as class
relations, that is a certain class of people in society has been privileged in
regard to the productive forces. However, the two are quick to note that the
means of production did not always involve class relation. Primitive man had
produced communally and of course socialism would establish the classless
production relations. Economically demarcated classes are also classes in a
social sense, essentially because members of the same class tend to view the
world in a similar way.
According
to Marx what keep the two classes together is not principles but rather the
material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, it can be
likened to the contrast between town and the country. Upon the social
conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and
peculiary formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. the
ideology of the ruling class, tends to predominant over that of the other class
because of the ruling class’s hegemony over intellectual as well as material
production, the class which has the means of material production at its
disposal usually controls the means of mental production2 (Cohen
1978). The determinant of social life is the work people are doing, especially
work that results in provision of the basic necessities of life, food, clothing
and shelter. Marx thought that the way the work is socially organized and the
technology used in production will have a strong impact on every other aspect
of society. He maintained that everything of value in society results from
human labor. Thus, Marx saw working men and women as engaged in making society,
in creating the conditions for their own existence.
In
the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite
relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production
appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of
production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness
of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that
determines their consciousness (Marx 1971:20).
Capitalists
increase the levels of industrialization, exploitation, market driven forces
such as commodification, false consciousness, ideology and reification. Marx
argues that these factors have dialectical effects and will push capitalism
inexorably towards social changes. Conflict and social changes begin with a
change in the way we are aware of our world. They begin with class
consciousness. Marx notes that classes exist objectively whether we are aware
of them or not. He refers to this as a ‘class in itself’ that is an aggregate
of people who have a common relationship to the means of production. But
classes can also exist subjectively as a ‘class for itself’. It is the latter
that is produced through class consciousness. Class consciousness has two
parts; the subjective awareness that experiences of deprivation are determined
by structural class relations and not individual talent and effort and the
group identity that comes from such awareness (O’Neill 1966).
1Under feudalism, it is evident that
a surplus product is extracted, but the ulitarian character of the production
relation is concealed, the situation is reversed under capitalism, Cohen G.A,
‘Karl Marx and the Withering away of social science’ pp 190-191.
Industrialization
has two effects on class consciousness; it tends to increase exploitation and
alienation. Alienation is the feeling of being psychologically disenfranchised.
It is the state of being cut off from species being (the unique way in which human
survive as a species by creatively producing all that it needs). The objective
state can produce a sense or a feeling of belonging to a group that is
disenfranchised that is class consciousness. As capitalists employ more
machinery to aid in production, the objective levels of alienation and
exploitation increases. As the objective levels increase so does the
probability that workers will subjectively experience them, thus aiding in the
production of class consciousness (Tucker, 1978).
The
second effect of industrialization is an increase in the level of worker
communication. Worker communication is a positive function of education and
ecological concentration. Using more and more complex machines requires
increasing the levels of technical knowledge. For example using a bull and a
plough requires less knowledge and skills and compared to using a modern
tractor for farming. Increasing the use of technology in general requires an
increase in the education level of the worker. Besides, industrialization generally
increases the level of worker concentration. Moving workers from small guild
shops to large scale machine shops or assembly lines made interaction between
the workers possible in ways never possible before especially during break
sessions when hundreds of workers would gather. Economics of scale tend to
increase this concentration of the work force as well.
These
two processes- education and ecological concentration, work together in increasing
the level of communication among the workers. Further these processes are
supplemented through greater levels of communication and transportation
technologies. According to Marx communication and transportation would help the
worker movement spread from city to city (Bien, 1955).
Class
consciousness comes about as workers communicate with each other about the
problems associated with being a member of the working class. These things
occur due to structural changes brought about simply because of the way
capitalism workers. Capitalists are driven towards increasing profits and as a
result they use industrialization which sets in motion a whole series of
processes that tend to increase the class consciousness of the workers. Class
consciousness among the workers increases the possibility of social change. As workers
share grievances with one another they begin to doubt the legitimacy of the
distribution of scarce resources which in turn increases the level of overt
conflict. As class inequality and the level of bipolarization (distinctiveness
of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) increases, violence of the conflict
will tend to increase, which in turn will bring about deeper levels of social
change (Tucker, 1978).
However,
class consciousness has been difficult to achieve. The triad relationship
between the state, the elite and the workers is the reason for these
difficulties. Marx felt that as a result of the rise of class consciousness and
other factors such as the business cycle, workers unite and act through labor
unions to bring about change. Some of the work of the trade unions would be
violent but it would eventually lead to a successful social movement. In the
end the labor movement would bring about socialism. In the triad relationship Marx
is interested in two actors who are working in collusion. Under capitalism the
state is basically an arm of the elite. It is controlled by capitalists and
functions with the capitalist’s interests in mind. Majority of the top
governing officials come from the same social background as the bourgeoisie. For example the Kenyatta
and Moi families in Kenya where those pushing to form the next government are
people from the Bourgeoisie class.
Besides the elite tend to cross over, with military officers serving corporate
boards and as high placed political appointees and directors functioning as
political advisers. Policy and regulations by the elite and the ruling class
function to keep the capitalist system intact by maintaining the capitalist
position, silencing the workers and preventing class consciousness from
adequately forming (Fromm 1961).
The
state is also active in the production of ideology. According to Marx, the
state is ill defined, where the state begins and ends in capitalist democracies
is hard to tell. The state functions through many other institutions such as
the schools, police and its ideology is propagated through such institution. Police
power, for instance, is used to enforce property rights and guarantee unfair
contracts between capitalist and worker. Oppression also takes more subtle
forms: religion serves capitalist interests by pacifying the population;
intellectuals, paid directly or indirectly by capitalists, spend their careers
justifying and rationalizing the existing social and economic arrangements. The
worker is faced with a fairly cohesive ideology coming from various sources.
This dominant ideology creates a state of acceptance of the way the world works
against which it is difficult to create a class consciousness. The economic
structure of society molds the superstructure, including ideas (e.g., morality,
ideologies, art, and literature) and the social institutions that support the
class structure of society (e.g., the state, the educational system, the
family, and religious institutions). Because the dominant or ruling class (the
bourgeoisie) controls the social relations of production, the dominant ideology
in capitalist society is that of the ruling class. Ideology and social
institutions, in turn, serve to reproduce and perpetuate the economic class
structure. Thus, Marx viewed the exploitative economic arrangements of
capitalism as the real foundation upon which the superstructure of social,
political, and intellectual consciousness is built (Marx 1971).
The
movement of capitalist exploitation across national boundaries accentuates the trickle-down
effect of capitalism in the major capitalist states such as the United States.
Because workers in all the capitalists states are been exploited, the workers
in a particular country can be paid considerable wages in comparison to other
areas. In addition, this is functional for the capitalists in that it provides
a collection of buyers for the world’s goods and services. Moving work out of
the majority capitalist states and making it the world’s marketplace changes
the kind of ideology or culture that is needed. There is a movement from
workers identities to consumer identities in such economies (Tucker 1978).
According
to Fromm (1961), Capitalists use these world labor markets to pit workers
against each other. While wages are certainly higher due to exported
exploitation, workers are also aware that their jobs are in jeopardy as work is
moved out of the country. Capitalists always require a certain level of
unemployment. This is supported by the business cycle that emphasizes that zero
unemployment means higher wages and lower profits to the firms thus a small
level of unemployment is necessary to maintain the economy. The world labor
market makes available an extremely large pool of unemployed workers. Workers
in advanced industrialized economies therefore see themselves in competition
with much cheaper labor. This global competition hinders class consciousness by
shifting the workers focus of attention away from the owners and onto the
foreign labor markets. The workers are up in arms against each other instead of
directing their energies towards the elite in the society. The workers are
threatened and are inclined to always look at the economic problems in terms of
political and global issues rather than class issues. The workers are divide
themselves over issues other than class (Tucker 1978).
CONCLUSION
Marx's view of history
might seem completely cynical or pessimistic, were it not for the possibilities
of change revealed by his method of dialectical analysis. (The Marxist
dialectical method, based on Hegel's earlier idealistic dialectic, focuses
attention on how an existing social arrangement, or thesis, generates its
social opposite, or antithesis, and on how a qualitatively different social
form, or synthesis, emerges from the resulting struggle.) Marx was an optimist.
He believed that any stage of history based on exploitative economic
arrangements generated within it the seeds of its own destruction. For
instance, feudalism, in which land owners exploited the peasantry, gave rise to
a class of town-dwelling merchants, whose dedication to making profits
eventually led to the bourgeois revolution and the modern capitalist era.
Similarly, the class relations of capitalism will lead inevitably to the next
stage, socialism. The class relations of capitalism embody a contradiction:
capitalists need workers, and vice versa, but the economic interests of the two
groups are fundamentally at odds. Such contradictions mean inherent conflict
and instability, the class struggle. Adding to the instability of the
capitalist system are the inescapable needs for ever-wider markets and
ever-greater investments in capital to maintain the profits of capitalists.
Marx expected that the resulting economic cycles of expansion and contraction,
together with tensions that will build as the working class gains greater
understanding of its exploited position (and thus attains class consciousness),
will eventually culminate in a socialist revolution.
Despite this
sense of the unalterable logic of history, Marxists see the need for social
criticism and for political activity to speed the arrival of socialism, which,
not being based on private property is not expected to involve as many
contradictions and conflicts as capitalism. Marxists believe that social theory
and political practice are dialectically intertwined, with theory enhanced by
political involvement and with political practice necessarily guided by theory.
Intellectuals ought, therefore, to engage in praxis, to combine political
criticism and political activity. Theory itself is seen as necessarily critical
and value-laden, since the prevailing social relations are based upon
alienating and dehumanizing exploitation of the labor of the working classes.
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