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Che Guevara once said that “if you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine”. If you are angry and want to fight against injustice, this is a good beginning. But you must take a further step.
You need to be part of a revolutionary organisation. We need organisation to unite our forces and catalyse the mass movement of working-class people and youth to defeat the exploiters and oppressors who perpetuate injustice.
The dominant ideas in any society are the ideas of the dominant classes; the classes of those who rule over the rest of society. That is why you see many people who are being exploited somehow see their state of exploitation as the normal state of affairs during normal periods, even though they hate it.
Rather than overthrowing the oppressive system they endure and believe is divinely established and eternal, they aspire to wealth and power within it, doing their best – often without success – to join the ruling class. Alternatively, they resign themselves to a system where some prosper while others die in poverty, comforted by the promise of an afterlife.
But from time to time, a spark changes normal situations to one of mass uprisings, and you see some of those that are even most tolerant of the system before join in a fight against it somehow or the other.
Activists and organisations in the socialist movement understand that we must reorganise society to ensure that every woman, man, and child lives a better life.
These include social democrats who believe that capitalism does not have to be overthrown for such reorganisation to be achieved. There are also anarchists who believe that all we need to do is overthrow all forms of authority, including the state at once and build a free, classless society; socialism.
Then, there are revolutionary socialists who are Marxists. In the following sections, we look at what distinguishes Marxism, which is the dialectical approach to theory and practice.
Philosophy: starting from the abstract
What distinguishes Marxism as a theory for understanding society to enable us to change it is its method of analysis. This method is called dialectics. It is the basis for historical materialism, which is the approach at the heart of Marxism.
Other socialist or activist philosophies share something with the ideologies of capitalism. They see history and society as fixed realities which are changed by events or people’s actions and ideas with a linear cause-and-effect relationship.
The dialectical method starts from the standpoint that everything which exists is material, interconnected, and in constant motion.
We can use a reference to some basic principles of physics or chemistry that some of us could remember from secondary school. We recall atoms comprise all forms of matter (and atoms themselves are comprised of protons, neutrons, and electrons that are eternally in motion).
Connections and interactions between molecules, made up of atoms, make up everything in existence, such as cells forming tissues and organs in human and animal bodies.
So, without atoms, we cannot talk of the many forms of matter we see in their various differences. But we cannot reduce any of these forms of matter to being just “combinations of atoms”.
Dialectics is that approach that shows how the “atom” of society, its molecules, and other forms of existence develop. It grasps social life and its development as components and as a totality in contradictory and unified interaction. The method also helps us identify the essence of each phase of development of social life within the form of such existence.
Getting more concrete: political economy
Going forward in a more concrete way, how do we see society? We could see it in different ways. But these would include the economy, politics, civil society, institutions of all sorts (educational, religious, etc) and so on and so forth. But what is the essential base? We can find it only in the material reproduction of society. Friedrich Engels, the lifelong friend and comrade of Karl Marx, described it thus:
“(hu)mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art and even the ideas in religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”
Thus, from the philosophical heart of the Marxist method, we head into the concrete element of the historical materialist approach, i.e., the political economy. To understand history, we study the development of the productive forces.
These forces include the most important of them all i.e., the labour of human beings who transform society with their work. Society does not exist in forms that are fixed or fortuitous. They emerge from the struggle of classes as the development of productive forces makes the continued exploitation of the labouring classes by the classes of those with property untenable.
Capitalism is the highest form of the mode of production, whose social formations are based on the exploitation of labour and other productive forces. The modern working class is the most advanced labouring class in history. It cannot win its emancipation without overthrowing the exploitative system which benefits property owners.
Scientific socialism: the working-class’ self-emancipation
Based on the dialectical method, Marxism shows that the liberation of the exploited people cannot be an act of benevolence by the ruling class or rest on the goodwill and radical work of some revolutionary ideologues. It has to be won by the working class itself.
And this can emerge only when society’s development itself gets to a point where there is more than enough to fulfil the needs of everybody (but of course, not the greed of a few).
Scarcity characterised earlier social formations. Think back to the “early (wo)man” or to the pre-capitalist periods of feudalism, for example. Contrast this with the remarkable scientific and technological progress under capitalism, where even capitalist economists acknowledge that human productivity could ensure a fulfilling life for all, were it not for the appropriation of social wealth by a few capitalists.
We can change the world, building a better society, socialism, on the ruins of this cruel and nightmarish reality of capitalism. You can be part of this struggle in the fullest possible way, as a revolutionary socialist, as a Marxist. If you are not yet one, join us today. Join the revolutionary socialists; join the Socialist Workers League (SWL).
by E. ‘Tódùn JAGUN