Sociology Index

MARXISM

Marxism is philosophical, political, economic and sociological ideas associated with Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels. The term Marxism is also used more generally to refer to work in the social sciences and humanities that employs key ideas and concepts from Marx and Engels. Marxist ideas claim that each historical period has a distinct mode of production that rests upon particular forces of production and distinct ways of organizing social relationships between people in the economy. This mode of production then exerts the primary influence in shaping social relations within the society as well as its politics, law and intellectual ideas.

 

 

Marxism And Darwinism

 

The importance of marxism as well as of Darwinism consists in their following out the theory of evolution. The reason for Marxism's attraction to Darwinism is the apparent support Darwinism gives to atheism. Marxist Feminism is a form of feminism which believes that women's oppression is a symptom of a more fundamental form of oppression.

 

Communism differs from socialism because it contemplates revolutionary social change rather than just electoral politics. The first modern communist society was established in Russia after the revolution of 1917 and this political system was imposed by the Soviet Union, after the second world war, on many countries of Eastern Europe.

 

In Asia, a successful communist-led revolution in China in 1949 led to the growth of communist regimes and political movements in other areas, including Korea, Vietnam and Malaysia. These centralized and dictatorial communist systems were far from the model societies envisaged by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who believed that a communist revolution would create co-operative collective ownership a true community-based democracy and a weakening of the role of the state. 

 

Darwin and Marx have dominated the human mind in the second half of the 19th century. Marxism as well as of Darwinism consists in their following out the theory of evolution, the one upon the domain of the organic world, of things animate; the other, upon the domain of society.

 

Theory of evolution, however, was in no way new, it had its advocates before Darwin and Marx; the philosopher, Hegel, made it even as the central point of his philosophy. It is, therefore, necessary to observe closely what were the achievements of Darwin and Marx in this domain.