A Modern View of Marxism

In the early to mid-1800s, within the context of the 1847 revolutions, a new political philosophy was being developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This new set of ideas fit a theoretical scientific model and said that people that were part of the proletariat, or the oppressed lower class, would initiate a revolution against the bourgeoisie, or the rich landowners who controlled the tight conditions of labor in factories across Europe. Furthermore, he proposed that the bourgeoisie would become more competitive and many people would fall down to the proletariat group, increasing the tensions that would later cause class warfare. Following the revolution, Marx speculated that the proletariat would create a classless, unreligious, and utopian society. Although Marx’s theory was sound in a scientific sense, the fact that it did not account for human nature turned out to be its downfall.

The early experiences of Marx and Engels in the context of industrialization, particularly the cloth factory of Engels’ father, can be identified, at least to a moderate degree, as the cause of the development of their book, The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848. The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels’ book regarding the oppression of the proletariat during his upbringing, also had a major impact on the development of the newly created Communist League, a group of which Engels and Marx were the leaders.

Additionally, the utopian socialists, which included Fourier, Owen, and Saint-Simon, provided an appropriate exposition for the type of economic conservatism that surrounded Marx’s campaign. Hegel’s book, The Dialectic, which included the concepts of a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, also proved to have a direct effect on Marx’s calculation of events to come, as exhibited in his ideas regarding dialectic materialism. The merits of this idea, which could be used to explain the origin of class warfare in the first place, have been combined with Marx’s Labor Theory of Value to form strong conclusions based on logic.

Marx’s statement, “religion is the opiate of the masses,” has been interpreted many times by historians to reflect the influence of the ideas of the Enlightenment on Marx’s theories. It is often speculated that the development of Deism in the late 1700s yielded a newfound orientation away from organized religion. Although Marx later wrote that he believed that the church was brainwashing and manipulating people, it is undeniable that it gave them a sense of hope and purpose in their everyday lives.