The Marxian model of society

The Marxian model of society is based on the concept of historical materialism, which gives rise eventually to a capitalist society of starkly divided classes and alienated individuals whose relationships are based on the mode of production. Marx sees society as a material entity which evolves from crude to more refined means of production, with ever greater gaps of wealth and power between the owner and worker classes, and individuals suffering from greater alienation as they become commodities themselves in the means of production. The alienation and class conflict eventually becomes so severe that violent revolution occurs, led by enlightened workers, and resulting in the dictatorship of the proletariat, which gives way to the ideal socialist society.

Marx focuses more on his critique of capitalistic society than on the socialist utopia. Among his most important ideas was that "existence determines consciousness." Most fundamentally, this phrase means that Marx believed that human individual and social consciousness was shaped by the conditions of the environment, the class conflicts, the means of production, the forces of alienation at work in capitalism.

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production....

The sum total of these . . . constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to

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see the power of labor unions in the class struggle, a modern addition to the conflict which certainly took some of the pressure off society and the struggle between workers in and owners of the means of production. He also did not foresee employee-owned businesses. Nevertheless, much of what Marx had to say in his critique of the processes of capitalism does seem applicable and relevant still today. The fact that communism failed in its various forms does not allow us to dismiss Marxism, for those failed efforts do not invalidate his critique of capitalism, although they may show that bringing to reality an ideal utopia is as hard under communism as it is under "democracy" or capitalism. Marx argued that all societies would eventually go through a process which resulted in capitalism, that it was historically and materially inevitable. Of course, that does not seem to be the case in many desperately poor nations. However, as Anthony Brewer writes in Marxist Theories of Imperialism, underdeveloped nations are not capitalistic, but they are now a part of a world which is dominated by capitalism, and as a result they are being shaped by it. They have become, in effect, an exploited reserve of consumers for the capitalism which r

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