( good reply to false interpretations of Marx's view of history )

Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism ( controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin ) certainly shows the influence of Hegel's claim that one should view reality ( and history ) dialectically.

Marx's view of capitalism was two-sided.

Marx's dual view of capitalism can be seen in his description of the capitalists: he refers to them as to vampires sucking worker's blood, but at the same time, he notes that drawing profit is " by no means an injustice " and that capitalists simply cannot go against the system.

* Jim Devine's alternative view of Marx's LTV

Eventually coming to adopt an orthodox Marxist-Leninist position by accepting not only Marx's ideas but also those of Lenin, he came to view Chinese nationalism as a powerful tool in the national liberation struggle against western and Japanese dominance, but unlike orthodox Marxist-Leninists also viewed nationalism as something intrinsically valuable in itself.

Although Hegel's philosophy of history is similar to Immanuel Kant's, and Karl Marx's theory of revolution towards the common good is partly based on Kant's view of history.

The idea bears some similarity to Marx's view that human society would progress toward a communist peak.

One can also find this view in Maurice Dobb's Theories of Value and Distribution Since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory ( 1973 ), as well as in Karl Marx's Theories of Surplus Value.

On the contrary, Marx's statements in his March 1850 Address explicitly contradict such a view, assuming a ' period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat '.

The Communist Manifesto alludes to Marx's view that the dominance of the bourgeoisie is a necessary prelude to that of the proletariat: ' the bourgeoisie therefore produces ... its own grave-diggers.

In the view of historian David Fernbach, the suppression of the paper in March 1843 by the Prussian government shattered Marx's belief that the country could traverse the road from monarchy to constitutional democracy without revolutionary struggle.

Further, London assumed that the Socialist Party would become a mass party in the United States, strong enough to have a realistic chance of winning national elections and gaining power – while remaining a revolutionary party fully committed to the dismantling of capitalism, the whole book is based on Marx's view that capitalism was inherently unsustainable.

" Muravchik further argued that, in contrast, Marx made untestable predictions about the future, and that Marx's view that socialism would be created by impersonal historical forces may lead one to conclude that it is unnecessary to strive for socialism, because it will happen anyway.

Revolutionary Marxists, following Marx, take the view that, on the one hand, the working class grows stronger through its battle for reforms, ( such as, in Marx's time, the ten-hours bill ):

He was critical of both capitalism and communism, and critical of Karl Marx's view of dialectical materialism as the only truth.

Methodologically, his view of history followed the Hegelian dialectic tradition, that culminated in Marx's historical materialism.

Ellacuría rejected as well Marx's view of human beings as objects of their material conditions.

Marx's view of commodities in Capital is illustrated by the following quote:

Karl Marx's work was based on a material view of the world that showed natural causes and effects for all aspects of human society and economy.

However, Marx's view was that the expansion of capitalist markets tended to dissolve and displace older ways of producing over time.

The work contains the most famous formulation of Marx's view of the role of the individual in history: " Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please ; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

However, cultural determinists do not necessarily disagree with Marx's view of social class as an important determining factor as well.

Nevertheless, they made naught of Marx's prophecy that capitalism would never pay the `` workers '' -- to use Marx's word -- more than a subsistence wage, with the consequence that increased productivity must inevitably find its way into the capitalists' pockets with the result, in turn, that the gap between the rich and the poor would irrevocably widen and the misery of the poor increase.

Significantly, Karl Marx's theory of alienation argues among other things that capitalism disrupts the rooted nature of traditional relationships between workers and their work.

Despite Marx's stress on critique of capitalism and discussion of the new communist society that should replace it, his explicit critique of capitalism is guarded, as he saw it as an improved society compared to the past ones ( slavery and feudal ).

Against Marx's " historical materialism ," Weber emphasised the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism.

In some way, the idea of " human capital " is similar to Karl Marx's concept of labor power: he thought in capitalism workers sold their labor power in order to receive income ( wages and salaries ).

Elaborating on Marx's argument that under capitalism our lives and our environment are continually depleted, Debord adds that the Spectacle is the system by which capitalism tries to hide such depletion.

Social geographer David Harvey sums up the differences between Marx's usage of these concepts and Schumpeter's: " Both Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter wrote at length on the ' creative-destructive ' tendencies inherent in capitalism.

Geographer and historian David Harvey in a series of works from the 1970s onwards ( Social Justice and the City, 1973 ; The Limits to Capital, 1982 ; The Urbanization of Capital, 1985 ; Spaces of Hope, 2000 ; Spaces of Capital, 2001 ; Spaces of Neoliberalization, 2005 ; The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, 2010 ), elaborated Marx's thought on the systemic contradictions of capitalism, particularly in relation to the production of the urban environment ( and to the production of space more broadly ).

In Marx's scheme, feudalism was replaced by capitalism, which would eventually be superseded by communism.

In Statism and Anarchy, Mikhail Bakunin identified a " statist " tendency within the socialist movement and contrasted it with anarchist socialism, arguing that Karl Marx's theory of transition from capitalism to socialism in which the working class seized state power in a Dictatorship of the proletariat would eventually lead to a usurpation of power by the state apparatus acting in its own self-interest.

" Marx's theory follows a materialist law of history and space, where the development of the productive forces is seen as the primary motive force for historical change, and according to which the social and material contradictions inherent to capitalism will inevitably lead to its negation, thereby replacing capitalism with a new rational form of society: communism.

In Karl Marx's critique of the political economy of capitalism, commodity fetishism is the transformation of human relations, derived from the trading of commodities in the market, whereby the social relationships among people are expressed with objectified economic relationships, between the commodities and the money used to buy them.

In the book For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign ( 1972 ), Baudrillard developed the semiotic theory of " the Sign " ( sign value ) as a development of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism and of the exchange-value vs. use-value dichotomy of capitalism.

Bernstein was principally concerned with refuting Marx's predictions about the imminent and inevitable demise of capitalism, and Marx's consequent laissez faire policy which opposed socialist interventions before the demise.

Thus, on Marx's theory, there can be general overproductive crises within capitalism.

An illustration of this may be given by Marx's critique of political economy: bourgeois political economy is denounced as concerning itself with only how the capitalism system works day-to-day, but doesn't poses the problem of how capitalism first appeared, what are the conditions of possibility of this appearance of capitalism and, finally, what are the conditions of its dissolving.

Marx's value theory, Lenin saw monopoly capital as plagued by the law of the tendency of profit to fall, as the ratio of constant capital to variable capital increases.

Karl Marx's famous Critique of the Gotha Program criticized what he saw as a Lassallean victory over the Eisenachers whom he favored ; interestingly, Bernstein later noted that it was Liebknecht, considered by many to be the strongest Marxist advocate within the Eisenacher faction, who proposed the inclusion of many of the ideas which so thoroughly irritated Marx.

The earlier International however was not able to withstand the differences between anarchist and Marxist currents, with the anarchists largely withdrawing after the Hague Congress of 1872 which saw the expulsion of leading libertarians Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume over their criticism of Karl Marx's party-political approach to social change.

The book seeks to clarify differences between Marx's and Hegel's dialectics, and to more thoroughly demarcate the " break " which Althusser saw between Marx's later writings ( Marxism proper ) and his early, Hegelian work.

For instance, Sorel saw pessimism and irrationalism at the core of Marxism and rejected Karl Marx's own rationalism and " utopian " tendency.