Development of Marxist Theory

The conceptions of Karl Marx derive from his view of the nature and origin of society. Marx had a conception of human history based on dialectical materialism, and this includes the underlying idea that the determining factors in the development, relations, and institutions of mankind are not mystical or ideological but economic. All human actions are rooted in labor activities and in the nature of the relations deriving from those activities. Human beings must secure a livelihood, and to accomplish this they organize their productive forces to operate throughout the resulting economic spectrum. Everything else in life rests on this economic foundation. It is through this economic structure that society comes into being, and the society that results is made up of social classes, with one class dominant at a given time based on the control of the means of production. Human nature is expressed in the way individuals relate to class and the way they are controlled by that relationship. The workers sell their labor

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and Marx, in particular, indulged in caustic diatribes against Herzen's plans for rejuvenating Europe through the influence of Russian primitive socialism. . . (Schapiro 133-134). One of the interesting things about the Russian Revolution is that it took place in a country that had not achieved the level of capitalism called for by Marx and Engels as a precursor to the revolution of the proletariat. Lenin did not believe it was necessary to wait for that stage of capitalist development, and so he skipped that step by simply declaring that Russia already was a capitalist country: This eccentric view, which no other student of the Russian economy is known to have shared, rested on an idiosyncratic interpretation of statistical data on agriculture. Lenin convinced himself that the Russian village was in the throes of "class differentiation" which transformed a minority of peasants into a "petty bourgeoisie" and the majority into a landless rural proletariat (Pipes 347). Lenin describes the oppression noted by Marx in terms of imperialism as a stage in capitalism, and he sees monopoly as a form of imperialism. He also sees imperialism as a form of capitalism in transition, "or, more precisely, as moribund capitalism" (Knoebel
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Approximate Word count = 1494
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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