Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Complicating this is the fact that Marx's own ideas about the state changed as he grew older, differing in his early pre-communist phase, in the young Marx phase which predates the unsuccessful 1848 uprisings in Europe, and in his later work. Marx initially followed an evolutionary theory of the state.
Some trace the concept of the state withering away back to the early Karl Marx of the 1840s and to the socialist anarchist theorist Proudhon (1809-1865). [3] However, Marx's advocacy for the dictatorship of the proletariat and Proudhon's antagonism towards the state [4] proved uncomfortable bedfellows, [5] and the two thinkers parted company c ...
[6] [7] [8] As Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Program, "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat". [9]
In Marx's analysis, the "secular state" is not opposed to religion, but rather actually presupposes it. The removal of religious or property qualifications for citizens does not mean the abolition of religion or property, but only introduces a way of regarding individuals in abstraction from them.
Marx and Engels wrote a new preface for the 1882 Russian edition, translated by Georgi Plekhanov in Geneva. In it they wondered if Russia could directly become a communist society, or if she would become capitalist first like other European countries. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels provided the prefaces for five editions between 1888 and 1893.
Marx regarded this mismatch between economic base and social superstructure as a major source of social disruption and conflict. [ 251 ] Despite Marx's stress on the critique of capitalism and discussion of the new communist society that should replace it, his explicit critique is guarded, as he saw it as an improved society compared to the ...
For Marxists, socialism or, as Marx termed it, the first phase of communist society, can be viewed as a transitional stage characterised by common or state ownership of the means of production under democratic workers' control and management, which Engels argued was beginning to be realised in the Paris Commune of 1871, before it was overthrown ...
Marx discusses his conception of communism in his third manuscript. [45] For Marx, communism is "the positive expression of the abolition of private property". [46] Marx here claims that previous socialist writers had offered only partial, unsatisfactory insights on the overcoming of alienation. [45]