Consistently with his contextualism, Dewey stressed the social circumstances in which different moral theories arose. His Ethics begins, not with a review of rival moral theories, but with a survey of anthropology and a brief history of the moral problems and practices of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. By locating moral theories in their social contexts, Dewey exposed their limitations. Theories that make sense in certain contexts may not make sense in others. For example, Dewey argued that the failure of ancient Greek teleological theories to grasp the independence of the right from the good arose from the fact that the good for individual citizens of Greek city-states was inextricably wrapped up with participation in civic life and promotion of the good of the city-state as a whole.
Dewey also stressed the ways abstract philosophical doctrines are socially embodied, frequently so as to rationalize and reinforce stultifying and unjust social arrangements. For example, the sharp dichotomy between purely instrumental and intrinsic goods both reflects and reinforces an organization of work life that reduces it to drudgery. Since work is of merely instrumental value, so the thinking goes, there is no point in trying to make it interesting to those who do it. The dichotomy also rationalizes oppressive class divisions. Insofar as the good life is conceived in terms of devotion to or enjoyment of purely intrinsic, noninstrumental goods (such as intellectual contemplation and the appreciation of beauty), it is a life that can be led only by a leisured class, whose members do not have to spend their time earning a living. This class depends upon a working class whose function is to provide them with the leisure they need to pursue the good life. Dewey's critique of traditional ways of distinguishing means from ends is thus simultaneously a critique of class hierarchy.
Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual . Thus, in contrast with his voluminous political commentaries, Dewey published very little on personal “applied ethics.” The rapid social changes that were taking place in his lifetime required new institutions, as traditional customs and laws proved themselves unable to cope with such issues as mass immigration, class conflict, the Great Depression, the demands of women for greater independence, and the threats to democracy posed by fascism and communism. As a progressive liberal, Dewey advocated numerous social reforms such as promoting the education, employment, and enfranchisement of women, social insurance, the progressive income tax, and laws protecting the rights of workers to organize labor unions. However, he stressed the importance of improving methods of moral inquiry over advocating particular moral conclusions, given that the latter are always subject to revision in light of new evidence.
Thus, the main focus of Dewey's social ethics concerns the institutional arrangements that influence the capacity of people to conduct moral inquiry intelligently. Two social domains are critical for promoting this capacity: schools, and civil society. Both needed to be reconstructed so as to promote experimental intelligence and wider sympathies. Dewey wrote numerous works on education, and established the famous Laboratory School at the University of Chicago to implement and test his educational theories. He was also a leading advocate of the comprehensive high school, as opposed to separate vocational and college prepatory schools. This was to promote the social integration of different economic classes, a prerequisite to enlarging their mutual understanding and sympathies. Civil society, too, needed to be reconstructed along more democratic lines. This involved not just expanding the franchise, but improving the means of communication among citizens and between citizens and experts, so that public opinion could be better informed by the experiences and problems of citizens from different walks of life, and by scientific discoveries (PP). Dewey regarded democracy as the social embodiment of experimental intelligence informed by sympathy and respect for the other members of society . Unlike dictatorial and oligarchic societies, democratic ones institutionalize feedback mechanisms (free speech) for informing officeholders of the consequences for all of the policies they adopt, and for sanctioning them (periodic elections) if they do not respond accordingly.
Dewey's moral epistemology thus leads naturally to his political philosophy. The reconstruction of moral theory is accomplished by replacing fixed moral rules and ends with an experimental method that treats norms for valuing as hypotheses to be tested in practice, in light of their widest consequences for everyone. To implement this method requires institutions that facilitate three things: (1) habits of critical, experimental inquiry; (2) widespread communication of the consequences of instituting norms, and (3) extensive sympathy, so that the consequences of norms for everyone are treated seriously in appraising them and imagining and adopting alternatives. The main institutions needed to facilitate these things are progressive schools and a democratic civil society. Experimentalism in ethics leads to a democratic political philosophy.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Social Ethics
Dewey's Moral Philosophy
John Dewey (1859-1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It emancipated its slaves, but subjected them to white supremacy. It absorbed millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, but faced wrenching conflicts between capital and labor as they were integrated into the urban industrial economy. It granted women the vote, but resisted their full integration into educational and economic institutions. As the face-to-face communal life of small villages and towns waned, it confronted the need to create new forms of community life capable of sustaining democracy on urban and national scales. Dewey believed that neither traditional moral norms nor traditional philosophical ethics were up to the task of coping with the problems raised by these dramatic transformations. Traditional morality was adapted to conditions that no longer existed. Hidebound and unreflective, it was incapable of changing so as to effectively address the problems raised by new circumstances. Traditional philosophical ethics sought to discover and justify fixed moral goals and principles by dogmatic methods. Its preoccupation with reducing the diverse sources of moral insight to a single fixed principle subordinated practical service to ordinary people to the futile search for certainty, stability, and simplicity. In practice, both traditional morality and philosophical ethics served the interests of elites at the expense of most people. To address the problems raised by social change, moral practice needed to be thoroughly reconstructed, so that it contained within itself the disposition to respond intelligently to new circumstances. Dewey saw his reconstruction of philosophical ethics as a means to effect this practical reconstruction.
Dewey's ethics replaces the goal of identifying an ultimate end or supreme principle that can serve as a criterion of ethical evaluation with the goal of identifying a method for improving our value judgments. Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is of a piece with empirical inquiry more generally. It is the use of reflective intelligence to revise one's judgments in light of the consequences of acting on them. Value judgments are tools for enabling the satisfactory redirection of conduct when habit no longer suffices to direct it. As tools, they can be evaluated instrumentally, in terms of their success in guiding conduct. We test our value judgments by putting them into practice and seeing whether the results are satisfactory — whether they solve the problems they were designed to solve, whether we find their consequences acceptable, whether they enable successful responses to novel problems, whether living in accordance with alternative value judgments yields more satisfactory results. We achieve moral progress and maturity to the extent that we adopt habits of reflectively revising our value judgments in response to the widest consequences for everyone of living them out. This pragmatic approach requires that we locate the conditions of warrant for our value judgments in human conduct itself, not in any a priori fixed reference point outside of conduct, such as in God's commands, Platonic Forms, pure reason, or “nature,” considered as giving humans a fixed telos. To do so requires that we understand different types of value judgments in functional terms, as forms of conduct that play distinctive roles in the life of reflective, social beings. Dewey thereby offers a naturalistic metaethic of value judgments, grounded in developmental and social psychology.
Philosophical Thought 2
Dewey's writings on education, notably his The School and Society (1899) and The Child and the Curriculum (1902), presented and defended what were to remain the chief underlying tenets of the philosophy of education he originated. These tenets were that the educational process must begin with and build upon the interests of the child; that it must provide opportunity for the interplay of thinking and doing in the child's classroom experience; that the teacher should be a guide and coworker with the pupils, rather than a taskmaster assigning a fixed set of lessons and recitations; and that the school's goal is the growth of the child in all aspects of its being.
Among the results of Dewey's administrative efforts were the establishment of an independent department of pedagogy and of the University of Chicago's Laboratory Schools, in which the educational theories and practices suggested by psychology and philosophy could be tested. The Laboratory Schools, the original unit of which began operation in 1896, attracted wide attention and enhanced the reputation of the University of Chicago as a foremost centre of progressive educational thought. Dewey headed the Laboratory Schools from 1903 to 1904.
Dewey's ideas and proposals strongly affected educational theory and practice in the United States. Aspects of his views were seized upon by the “progressive movement” in education, which stressed the student-centred rather than the subject-centred school, education through activity rather than through formal learning, and laboratory, workshop, or occupational education rather than the mastery of traditional subjects. But though Dewey's own faith in progressive education never wavered, he came to realize that the zeal of his followers introduced a number of excesses and defects into progressive education. Indeed, in Experience and Education (1938) he sharply criticized educators who sought merely to interest or amuse students, disregarded organized subject matter in favour of mere activity on the part of students, and were content with mere vocational training.
During the last two decades of Dewey's life, his philosophy of education was the target of numerous and widespread attacks. Progressive educational practices were blamed for the failure of some American school systems to train pupils adequately in the liberal arts and for their neglect of such basic subjects as mathematics and science. Furthermore, critics blamed Dewey and his progressive ideas for what the former viewed as an insufficient emphasis on discipline in the schools.
Philosophical Thought
Dewey left Michigan in 1894 to become professor of philosophy and chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Dewey's achievements there brought him national fame. The increasing dominance of evolutionary biology and psychology in his thinking led him to abandon the Hegelian theory of ideas, which views them as somehow mirroring the rational order of the universe, and to accept instead an instrumentalist theory of knowledge, which conceives of ideas as tools or instruments in the solution of problems encountered in the environment. These same disciplines contributed somewhat later to his rejection of the Hegelian notion of an Absolute Mind manifesting itself as a rationally structured, material universe and as realizing its goals through a dialectic of ideas. Dewey found more acceptable a theory of reality holding that nature, as encountered in scientific and ordinary experience, is the ultimate reality and that man is a product of nature who finds his meaning and goals in life here and now.
Since these doctrines, which were to remain at the centre of all of Dewey's future philosophizing, also furnished the framework in which Dewey's colleagues in the department carried on their research, a distinct school of philosophy was in operation. This was recognized by William James in 1903, when a collection of essays written by Dewey and seven of his associates in the department, Studies in Logical Theory, appeared. James hailed the book enthusiastically and declared that with its publication a new school of philosophy, the Chicago school, had made its appearance.
Dewey's philosophical orientation has been labeled a form of pragmatism, though Dewey himself seemed to favour the term “instrumentalism,” or “experimentalism.” William James's The Principles of Psychology early stimulated Dewey's rethinking of logic and ethics by directing his attention to the practical function of ideas and concepts, but Dewey and the Chicago school of pragmatists went farther than James had gone in that they conceived of ideas as instruments for transforming the uneasiness connected with the experience of having a problem into the satisfaction of some resolution or clarification of it.
Dewey's preferred mode of inquiry was scientific investigation; he thought the experimental methods of modern science provided the most promising approach to social and ethical as well as scientific problems. He rejected the idea of a fixed and immutable moral law derivable from consideration of the essential nature of man, since such a traditional philosophical method denied the potential application and promise of newer empirical and scientific methods.
Dewey developed from these views a philosophical ground for democracy and liberalism. He conceived of democracy not as a mere form of government, but rather as a mode of association which provides the members of a society with the opportunity for maximum experimentation and personal growth. The ideal society, for Dewey, was one that provided the conditions for ever enlarging the experience of all its members.
Dewey's contributions to psychology were also noteworthy. Many of the articles he wrote at that time are now accepted as classics in psychological literature and assure him a secure place in the history of psychology. Most significant is the essay “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” which is generally taken to mark the beginnings of functional psychology—i.e., one that focuses on the total organism in its endeavours to adjust to the environment.
Educational theory and practice. Dewey's work in philosophy and psychology was largely centred in his major interest, educational reform. In formulating educational criteria and aims, he drew heavily on the insights into learning offered by contemporary psychology as applied to children. He viewed thought and learning as a process of inquiry starting from doubt or uncertainty and spurred by the desire to resolve practical frictions or relieve strain and tension. Education must therefore begin with experience, which has as its aim growth and the achievement of maturity.
Biography
John Dewey was born Oct. 20, 1859, Burlington, Vt., U.S.—died June 1, 1952, New York, N.Y. American philosopher and educator who was one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, and a leader of the progressive movement in education in the United States.
Early life
The son of a grocer in Vermont, Dewey attended the public schools of Burlington and there entered the University of Vermont. After graduating from the university in 1879, Dewey taught high school for three years. In the fall of 1882 he entered Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, for advanced study in philosophy. There he came under the influence of George Sylvester Morris, who was a leading exponent of Neo-Hegelianism, a revival of the thought of the early-19th-century German philosopher Hegel. Dewey found in this philosophy, with its emphasis on the spiritual and organic nature of the universe, what he had been vaguely groping for, and he eagerly embraced it.
After being awarded the Ph.D. degree by Johns Hopkins University in 1884, Dewey, in the fall of that year, went to the University of Michigan, where, at the urging of Morris, he had been appointed an instructor in philosophy and psychology. With the exception of the academic year 1888–89, when he served as professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Dewey spent the next 10 years at Michigan. During this time his philosophical endeavours were devoted mainly to an intensive study of Hegel and the British Neo-Hegelians and to the new experimental physiological psychology then being advanced in the United States by G. Stanley Hall and William James.
Dewey's interest in education began during his years at Michigan. His readings and observations revealed that most schools were proceeding along lines set by early traditions and were failing to adjust to the latest findings of child psychology and to the needs of a changing democratic social order. The search for a philosophy of education that would remedy these defects became a major concern for Dewey and added a new dimension to his thinking.
Marx's Labor Theory Of Value
One of the commonly debated topics of Marxism is the concept of 'the law of value'. Marx developed many different theories and various aspects of those theories are controversial. This paper will focus, however, only on the most basic of his theories, namely that of 'the labor theory of value'. This theory took several alternative forms over the course of Marx's different volumes of publications. It was very often in the center of criticism, but because of the short length of this paper not much can be said about the critics of Marx's theory.
Marx's central theme is the importance of the 'commodity production'. Marx defines a commodity as anything which possesses both use and exchange value, and price as its monetary expression. Marx tried to say that trees, unmined metals, or barren land were not commodities but were merely gifts of nature. An exchange value had to come into play for something to be considered a commodity.
The most easily recognized aspect of commodity production is the use of labor. For a commodity to be produced a certain amount of labor must be involved in the production process. Marx put labor at such an important position that unless labor was used commodity had no value. By doing this he made it clear how important everyone's labor contribution is to the economy. " If he could establish the fact that human labor-and labor alone-was value creating, it could be made to follow that only those who worked were entitled to share in the resulting output."(Balinky,60). Marx believed that if he could maintain the importance of labor then his plan would succeed.
This is why Marx considered labor as the essential part of any production process. The value of a product is directly related to the amount of labor that is needed to produce that product. The more productive the labor is the more value it adds to the commodity. Marx believed that if two products needed the same amount of labor to produce them, then they contained the same value. " Commodities... that can be produced in the same labour time...have the same values, and that, on the other hand, differences in value find their measure in the quantitative difference in the labour time required for the production of commodities" (Kuhne,70). Labor is directly related to the price of the commodity. Some of Marx's ideas about the value were changed in his later writings.
One would probably ask how could Marx account for the importance of capital. He knew that critics would jump at the opportunity to discredit his theory by claiming that he downplayed other vital inputs to production. Marx claimed that machinery and other means of production had needed labor for their production. "He began with the simple proposition that a commodity is produced by utilization of some combination of labor and physical instruments, i.e., machinery, tools, equipment, etc. He referred to this combination as the means of production necessary to the creation of any commodity".(Balinky, 61). Marx distinguished between two different types of capital, variable and constant. Variable capital was the capital used to pay for the wages of labor. This was the only type of capital Marx considered relevant for creation of value. According to his reasoning constant capital needed labor before it could produce anything. Machines without the necessary labor to run them could not contribute to value in Marx's theory. They would sit there unused and useless. So although he downplayed its importance of the capital, Marx attempted to explain why he did so.
Marx needed a unit of measurement to consistently and accurately measure the value of labor. He came up with the most simple explanation: the time. He would use hours, days and weeks as the "pure and simple" way to measure the amount of labor that was used to produce a commodity. However, a specialized labor in producing a product was worth more than a 'simple' unskilled labor. Marx did not really explain how he came to this conclusion, he left it to the faith of his follower to believe in his theory.
Marx knew that there were many questions about his labor theory of value. He made two revisions to it after his original exposition. In his first model, exchange values were relative to the quantities of labor needed to produce commodities in question. This assumed that every firm in that industry had the same 'composition of capital', i.e. the same capital-labor ratio. In his revision of the labor-value theory "he was forced to admit that even in the long run--for technical as well as value reasons--the organic composition of capital did vary significantly from one industry or sphere of production to another" (Balinky, 82). The effect of this was different rates of profit in different industries. This fact was not acknowledged in the original model. In his third model he changed his stance about a link between supply and demand. This shows that Marx did see faults in his original theory and tried to fix some of its problems.
The labor theory of value's main premise is that the common way to measure value of commodities is through the amount of labor used. Marx acknowledged value for only something that used labor and could be exchanged. The idea of commodity production was a very central and important part of his theory. He emphasized the importance of value that comes from these commodities and how all these can be measured by the common element of labor.
The Communist Manifesto
Throughout the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx talks about how the "spectre of Communism" is spreading across Europe and the World. Yet, on the whole, he never really discusses much what Communism is as much as he derides Capitalism and the many faults that he has with other Socialist systems. It would have been more appropriate for his work to be called "Anti-Capitalist and Other Socialism Ideas Manifesto." Marx does not, however, go into much detail about how Communists would run the economy. Due to the many misconceptions of what the Communist Manifesto is about, the following is a short summary and critique of this important piece of literature that had influenced many in this world.
The introduction of the manifesto starts off with the popular quote "A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism."(p.54) This provides much imagery to the reader and draws his or her into the body of work. Marx tries to make a clear understanding of what Communism is and how people would go about creating Communism. In a way, it was a platform for what Communism was to Marx. The organization Marx was in, the Second Congress of the Communist League, wanted him to write this manifesto so that it could be spread around. It was a way of promoting Communism, thus spreading throughout Europe much like the introduction wanted it to be thought of as.
Marx then goes into the first part of the body of his manifesto, which is the section entitled "Bourgeois and Proletarians." In this part, he goes into how society started communal but then became more unequal as time went on. Systems such as Feudalism, Mercantilism, and finally Capitalism benefited from the use of exploitation. He first introduces the idea that economic concerns of a nation drive history, and that the struggle between the rich bourgeoisie and the hard working proletariat would eventually lead to Communism. He goes on and on how the bourgeois have always got what they wanted. Marx does site positives that were done by this group, but he certainly seemed more reflective on the negatives committed by the bourgeois. Marx states the bourgeoisie "has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands." (Marx, p.59) He then describes the proletarians, or the labor class, and how they were formed, how they have suffered, and how they must overcome their struggles. Marx declares that this "`dangerous class,' the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution." (Marx, p.65) A revolution where the proletariats take over and dethrone the bourgeoisie.
The second section entitled "Proletarians and Communists" distinguishes how these two groups are one and the same. Marx first goes into detail about what Communists believe in, tries to show similarities between the two, and recommends that Communism be the best choice instead of the other forms of socialism. This is implied when Marx states "The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the prletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat." (Marx, p.67) He tries to give concrete details of what Communism is, such as his idea that "in Communist society, the present dominates the past." (Marx, p.69) This section, however is still doing a lot of bashing on the bourgeoisie. For example, Marx wrote that in "bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality." (Marx, p.69) He goes on and on about capital, bourgeois and communism. However, he really does not state any concrete ideas on how communists would run the economy.
"Socialist and Communist Literature" is the heading for the third section, and it is itself divided into many smaller sections. Reactionary Socialism has a)feudal socialism, b)petty bourgeois socialism, and c)German, or "True" Socialism as subsections. Conservative, or Bourgeois, Socialism and Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism do not have any subsections under them. Here, Marx goes into great detail trying to explain very briefly what each of these earlier, popular theories of socialism are all about, as well as his opinion on each of them. He states "Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions, for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions." (Marx, p.83) However, Communism does not need to do this and justifies itself by the movement of the proletariat. Once again, however, Marx does not offer any differing economic theories from these other Socialist ideologies. He still does not give a sample of Communist economic theory either.
Finally, Marx's last section of his Communist Manifesto is entitled "Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties" where he goes on giving the view of the Second Congress of the Coummunist League for which he was asked to write the manifesto for. He reiterates that "the Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement." (Marx, p.85) Yet again, no economic theory for Communism is stated. Thus, the Communist Manifesto is a very brief political rather than economic summary of what Communism is about. If one wishes to find capitalist bashing, other socialist ideas rebuked, and an opinion of bourgeoisie and proletariat life, the Communist Manifesto has all of this. But if one wants to find concise, specific information on what Communist ideologies and economic theories propose, the Communist manifesto will be too general.
Karl Marx's Economic Theories
For Karl Marx, the basic determining factor of human history is economics. According to him, humans — even from their earliest beginnings — are not motivated by grand ideas but instead by material concerns, like the need to eat and survive. This is the basic premise of a materialist view of history. At the beginning, people worked together in unity and it wasn’t so bad.
But eventually, humans developed agriculture and the concept of private property. These two facts created a division of labor and a separation of classes based upon power and wealth. This, in turn, created the social conflict which drives society.
All of this is made worse by capitalism which only increases the disparity between the wealthy classes and the labor classes. Confrontation between them is unavoidable because those classes are driven by historical forces beyond anyone’s control. Capitalism also creates one new misery: exploitation of surplus value.
For Marx, an ideal economic system would involve exchanges of equal value for equal value, where value is determined simply by the amount of work put into whatever is being produced. Capitalism interrupts this ideal by introducing a profit motive — a desire to produce an uneven exchange of lesser value for greater value. Profit is ultimately derived from the surplus value produced by workers in factories.
A laborer might produce enough value to feed his family in two hours of work, but he keeps at the job for a full day — in Marx’s time, that might be 12 or 14 hours. Those extra hours represent the surplus value produced by the worker. The owner of the factory did nothing to earn this, but exploits it nevertheless and keeps the difference as profit.
In this context, Communism thus has two goals: First it is supposed to explain these realities to people unaware of them; second it is supposed to call people in the labor classes to prepare for the confrontation and revolution. This emphasis on action rather than mere philosophical musings is a crucial point in Marx’s program. As he wrote in his famous Theses on Feuerbach : “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Society
Economics, then, are what constitute the base of all of human life and history — generating division of labor, class struggle, and all the social institutions which are supposed to maintain the status quo. Those social institutions are a superstructure built upon the base of economics, totally dependent upon material and economic realities but nothing else. All of the institutions which are prominent in our daily lives — marriage, church, government, arts, etc. — can only be truly understood when examined in relation to economic forces.
Marx had a special word for all of the work that goes into developing those institutions: ideology. The people working in those systems — developing art, theology, philosophy, etc. — imagine that their ideas come from a desire to achieve truth or beauty, but that is not ultimately true.
In reality, they are expressions of class interest and class conflict. They are reflections of an underlying need to maintain the status quo and preserve current economic realities. This isn’t surprising — those in power have always wished to justify and maintain that power.
Why Does Religion Exist?: Karl Marx's Analysis of Religion
According to Karl Marx, religion is like other social institutions in that it is dependent upon the material and economic realities in a given society. It has no independent history; instead it is the creature of productive forces. As Marx wrote, “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.”
According to Marx, religion can only be understood in relation to other social systems and the economic structures of society. In fact, religion is only dependent upon economics, nothing else — so much so that the actual religious doctrines are almost irrelevant. This is a functionalist interpretation of religion: understanding religion is dependent upon what social purpose religion itself serves, not the content of its beliefs.
Marx’s opinion is that religion is an illusion that provides reasons and excuses to keep society functioning just as it is. Much as capitalism takes our productive labor and alienates us from its value, religion takes our highest ideals and aspirations and alienates us from them, projecting them onto an alien and unknowable being called a god.
Marx has three reasons for disliking religion. First, it is irrational — religion is a delusion and a worship of appearances that avoids recognizing underlying reality. Second, religion negates all that is dignified in a human being by rendering them servile and more amenable to accepting the status quo. In the preface to his doctoral dissertation, Marx adopted as his motto the words of the Greek hero Prometheus who defied the gods to bring fire to humanity: “I hate all gods,” with addition that they “do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”
Third, religion is hypocritical. Although it might profess valuable principles, it sides with the oppressors. Jesus advocated helping the poor, but the Christian church merged with the oppressive Roman state, taking part in the enslavement of people for centuries. In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church preached about heaven, but acquired as much property and power as possible.
Martin Luther preached the ability of each individual to interpret the Bible, but sided with aristocratic rulers and against peasants who fought against economic and social oppression. According to Marx, this new form of Christianity, Protestantism, was a production of new economic forces as early capitalism developed. New economic realities required a new religious superstructure by which it could be justified and defended.
Marx’s most famous statement about religion comes from a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.
This is often misunderstood, perhaps because the full passage is rarely used: the boldface in the above is my own, showing what is usually quoted. The italics are in the original. In some ways, the quote is presented dishonestly because saying “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature...” leaves out that it is also the “heart of a heartless world.” This is more a critique of society that has become heartless and is even a partial validation of religion that it tries to become its heart. In spite of his obvious dislike of and anger towards religion, Marx did not make religion the primary enemy of workers and communists. Had Marx regarded religion as a more serious enemy, he would have devoted more time to it.
Marx is saying that religion is meant to create illusory fantasies for the poor. Economic realities prevent them from finding true happiness in this life, so religion tells them this is OK because they will find true happiness in the next life. Marx is not entirely without sympathy: people are in distress and religion does provide solace, just as people who are physically injured receive relief from opiate-based drugs.
The problem is that opiates fail to fix a physical injury — you only forget your pain and suffering. This can be fine, but only if you are also trying to solve the underlying causes of the pain. Similarly, religion does not fix the underlying causes of people’s pain and suffering — instead, it helps them forget why they are suffering and causes them to look forward to an imaginary future when the pain will cease instead of working to change circumstances now. Even worse, this “drug” is being administered by the oppressors who are responsible for the pain and suffering.
Life dan Work
The German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) was one of the most influential political writers in history. Indeed, in the last half of the twentieth century, almost half the people in the world lived in countries governed by principles based on Marx's work.
To understand the scope and importance of Marx, we must look to his childhood and to the political situation of his time. Marx grew up in a learned family that prized education. In fact, he came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of the family. In 1835, at the age of 17, Marx went to the University of Bonn to study law. However, Marx's father felt his son should go to a more serious school so, a year later, Marx was sent to the University of Berlin where he studied for four years.
Even as a young man, Marx had a thoughtful, philosophical bent. When he was 17 years old, he wrote a letter to his father, in which he pondered the choices that a young person must make when choosing a profession:
"...But the chief guide which must direct us in the choice of a profession is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection. It should not be thought that these two interests could be in conflict, that one would have to destroy the other; on the contrary, Man's nature is so constituted that he can attain his own perfection only by working for the perfection, for the good, of his fellow men. If he works only for himself, he may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfect, truly great man."
I have quoted from this letter at such length to show you that Marx was much more than a political philosopher. As he grew older, he developed into a highly educated economist, a historian, a social scientist and, eventually, a revolutionary.
In October 1842, not long after finishing his formal education, Marx began to edit a 4-month old liberal newspaper, "Rheinische Zeitung", in the Prussian city of Cologne. (At the time, Prussia was an independent kingdom, the largest and most important of the Germanic states.)
Up to now, Marx had looked at the study of the law only as an academic pursuit. However, "Rheinische Zeitung" was an outlet for the region's middle class and intellectuals, people who were strongly opposed to Prussian authoritarianism. As editor, Marx was obliged -- for the first time in his life -- to confront legal and political issues from a practical viewpoint. This led him to turn his attention to economics and, within a short time, he began to develop a progressive, anti- authoritarian philosophy.
In November of 1842, Marx met Friedrich Engels, a German writer who was visiting the newspaper on his way to England. Marx and Engels began to collaborate, the start of a fruitful and stimulating partnership that was to last the rest of their lives. Under Marx's guidance and Engels' influence, the newspaper became more and more radical. In March 1843, Marx was forced to resign and, two weeks later, the Prussian government closed down the paper.
Marx then traveled to Paris, where he became involved with working-class, socialist groups. At the end of 1844, he was expelled from Paris, and he and Engels went to Brussels, where they stayed for three years. During this interval, Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history, developing a materialistic conception of the field. In doing so, he took a very important philosophical step.
At the time, European metaphysics was dominated by Hegel's philosophy of idealism, based on two ideas. First, that reality is a creation of the mind; second, that history can be explained as an eternal struggle between opposing spiritual forces, a concept known as the Hegelian dialectic.
For Marx, reality was material, not spiritual. He rejected Hegel's interpretation of history in favor of a more practical doctrine, which came to be known as Dialectical Materialism. According to Marx, all progress takes place because of a "struggle of opposites", a naturally occurring process that cannot be influenced by individuals. People make social decisions solely in response to their economic needs and, thus, over time, the characteristics of a society are determined by its economic structure. Within a particular culture, classes arise based on people's relationships to the means of production. (For example, there are owners, managers, workers, and so on.)
These ideas served as the basis of a complex political doctrine that came to be called Marxism. Briefly, Marxism holds that the history of society is best-understood as "the history of class struggle". In the same way that the old feudal nobility was replaced by the bourgeoisie (that is, the capitalist class), the bourgeoisie itself will, one day, be replaced by the proletariat (the working class). In a capitalist system, the bourgeoisie is able to flourish because it extracts surplus profit from the products produced by the proletariat. However, capitalism has inherent contradictions, fatal weaknesses that, over time, become more and more severe. Eventually, the proletariat will become so impoverished that they will revolt and take control of the means of production, resulting in a completely classless society. Once this happens, the oppressive, coercive capitalist state will be replaced by a society based on rational economic cooperation.
While living in Brussels, Marx and Engels joined a newly formed organization of German emigre workers. The organization was based in London and called the Communist League. At the end of 1847, Marx and Engels traveled to London for a Communist League conference, where they were commissioned to write a "succinct declaration" of the organization's principles.
The result, published in 1848, was "The Communist Manifesto", arguably the single most influential political statement in history. Within the Communist Manifesto, Marx applied the concepts of dialectical materialism, asserting that social reform -- "the triumph of the working class" -- was not only desirable, but inevitable.
In May 1849, Marx was once again exiled. This time he moved to London, where he would live for the rest of his life. During this time, Marx did a great deal of writing and political organizing.
In the 1850s, he studied political economics and wrote weekly articles as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. In 1857, he produced an 800-page manuscript called "The Grundrisse" (Outlines), which was not published until 1941.
In the 1860s, he wrote three large volumes, "Theories of Surplus Value", in which he discussed theories of political economics. And in 1864, he and Engels helped found the International Workingmen's Association.
From 1867 to 1894, Marx created his greatest work, a three- volume treatise called "Das Kapital" ("Capital"), in which he used Dialectical Materialism to analyze and explain economic and social history. The first volume was published in 1876, and Marx worked on the other two for the rest of his life.
On March 14, 1883, Marx died. At his funeral, he was eulogized by Engels: "Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival... Though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work." After Marx's death, Engels edited and published the second and third volumes of "Das Kapital".
Although it is true that many of Marx's predictions about the course of the revolutionary movement were wrong (at least, so far), there is no gainsaying that he was a true genius who left a firm, enduring mark on the world in which he lived. Even today, there are many who believe, as Engels did, that, "just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history." As Marx himself wrote in a letter (to Engels in 1868):
"It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves."
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