Why study Marx
If your survival depends on a salary and if the reality of the majority of the population seems unfair to you, perhaps it’s time to start studying the works of Karl Marx, the German philosopher, sociologist, economist, and journalist who is considered by many people the incarnation of evil on earth. Marx’s choice, both as the focus of this text as a lens for reading reality is no accident.
The first step in changing social reality demands a deep dive into its dynamics, in order to know its gears and the engineer responsible for them. In order to facilitate this process of critical analysis of society and its social structures, having an in-depth and well-grounded theory is essential. Amid a sea of complexities and contradictions, a good theory is a compass that can that the navigators to the mainland.
For that matter, Marx’s books work as an indispensable theoretical tool for those that wish to decipher social reality and organize a radical transformation of living conditions. One of his most well-known intellectual productions is Capital. In it, we see capitalism, a system that took social inequality, misery, and environmental degradation to new levels, being exposed. Reading the book is to understand the motivations and contradictory dynamics that are entrenched in the daily lives of the majority.
What Marx exquisitely explores in this and other works is how economics conditions social reality, that is, how the economic interests of the ruling class are responsible for shaping social structures and, therefore, our lives. It is important to emphasize that when Marx talks about economics he does refer only to the economic aspect. In his books, the economy encompasses the set of relations of production and productive forces. In other words, he refers to wealth production and to social relations arising from the capitalist mode of production.
Apart from unraveling the modus operandi of the capitalist system, some of the Marxist books deal with a concept that is essential to understand why a significant portion of the population does not seem to see the problems and contradictions of this system. The concept is ideology. When talking about it, Marx refers to the power that a hegemonic idea, coming from the bourgeoisie, has over other layers of society.
The analysis is summarized in a passage of the book The German Ideology, in which he and his intellectual friend Friedrich Engels state: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”. In other words, the class that dominates economically determines the hegemonic thinking of an era.
As a result of the introjection or incorporation of the “dominant ideas”, many people from the working class perceive the condition of life as something natural. For many, the current economics, political, and social configuration is the only possible reality. Thus, the values of the bourgeoisie end up being treated as universal values, and not as values that belong to a minority class, in terms of the number of people.
Studying Marx’s Works is also to understand the origin and importance of private property to the capitalist system and how, from there, social classes originated, the struggles between them — what, for him, is the engine of society’s history — and how States were created with the intention of protecting and benefiting the interests of the ruling class.
What else?
Marx not only problematizes, but he also points out ways for a profound transformation of reality. According to him, to purge the dominant ideas, which do not resonate with the reality of many who reproduce them, it is necessary to have class consciousness and the comprehension that reality is the product of human actions and not a given destiny. That is, we need to denaturalize this system and understand that it was built on the interests of a minority whose power project involves capital accumulation for a few at the expense of the poverty of many.
As a path to an emancipated society, Marx defends that the political and socioeconomic organization known as communism, a term that when said out loud is the subject of belligerent speeches and unfounded fears. As he points out in some of his works, this is the most free form of sociability, with equally free work and life dynamics. A strong reasons for this assertion is the fact that, in a communist society, the means of production would be socialized, the class division resulting from the monopoly of these means would no longer exist, and the production would be geared to real human needs, and not to the accumulation of capital that generates so much exploitation, misery, and environmental degradation.
Due to the limitations of different orders, Marx was unable to approach all the problems of his time or even foresee those that nowadays permeate our reality. Even so, his works are still up-to-date and essential for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of the capitalist system, which are present in all spheres of our life. It is also essential for everyone looking for a way to organize and fight for a society completely different from the one we face.
