out that the development of capitalism had more subtleties and deviations than Marx envisioned. For example,
In underdeveloped countries the `surplus' is partly absorbed by the luxury spending of the ruling class, but much of it is transferred to the advanced countries (as profits), where it contributes to the problem of absorbing the rising surplus. Monopoly thus transforms capitalism from a force for development into a cause of stagnation.
Still, the point remains that Marx did grant to individuals and individual action a measure of significance which aligns him with neo-Marxists some of whom hold that he did not grant such significance. True, the individual's actions are dwarfed by the forces of economics and history, but those actions are not in any sense entirely negated by Marx: "Individual capitalists, workers, organizations of various sorts, may have purposes, but the system as a whole [i.e. capitalism] cannot."
Marx believed the ideas of individuals to be powerless as a force in history unless they are connected with materialism:
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. . . . Men are the producers of their . . . ideas . . . as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces. . . . [Ideas] have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.
Still, Neo-Marxian theorists have emphasized the individual in ways which certainly distinguish those theorists from both Marx and his traditional interpreters. The argument of such Marxists as Friedrich Engels that individuals were merely cogs in the capitalist machine
led to the major criticism of scientifically oriented economic determinism--th...