Response Paper 5
By Tom Wheat
For Pro. G. Brahm
Poli. 5
UCSC

The Cold War Techno-information revolution?

The BBC video, �Karl Marx and Marxism,� described Marx�s theories on human nature and the application of Marxist thought in the former Soviet bloc countries as well as its development on modern European political thought. Marx believed that in creating his philosophy that he had discovered a science to human nature in the industrializing economies of West, one of which there was innate conflict, i.e., a dialectic, brought on by capitalism and labor�s relationship to the factors of production. Marxism as a historical discourse defined society as having been organized under three types of evolutionary periods of progress. The first age of progress was the utopian age of the hunter and gatherer where class distinctions mattered less than collective survival. The second age was the age of classical empires and their legacy of feudalism on Western political and philosophical thought. The transition of monarchical feudalism to merchant mercantilism precipitated the rise of a wealthy capitalist class and a new emerging class of wage workers. As a direct result of the industrial revolution Marx saw the institutional seeds for revolution in capitalism in that now a new class society, was being formed in direct parallel to the current mode of evolutionary technological progress being afforded by capitalism.

According to the video Marx saw that innate societal conflict was sustained between three competing classes, the capitalist-bourgeoisie, the emerging industrial proletariat, and the agrarian peasants. Essentially, class conflict was sustained by class exploitation of the classes according to the whims of the capitalist class that derived an exploitative surplus labor value from the workers industrial output. Marx argued that political power entailed the ownership of property and since the productive value of labor only entailed a possession of a skill, one was selling one�s own personage, without the benefit or the means of ownership to the factors of production, i.e., ownership of surplus capital.

According to Marx this created the concept of alienation and false consciousness among the bourgeoisie and the peasant because they represented the reactionary elements of history that stood as obstructions to the class industrial evolution of a future liberated proletarian class. Alienation for the emerging factory worker was essentially that the actualized sum total of being alive was to exist and serve having been reduced to an accessory of the machine assembly line method of capitalist production. According to Marx in order for the exploitive classes to be able fill the void of alienation, capitalism substituted productive progress with consumerist fetishisms intended to replace traditional modes and values of independent production. Capitalism was inherently warlike and self destructive. Hence Marx favored violent class revolution and the institutionalization of all private property under the ownership of a centralized public welfare state.

According to the video�s historical assessment of the success and failures of Marxist thought in its application to political state systems one finds that Marxist ideology as it was dispensed by the Bolsheviks and Chinese represent far different forms of Communism then ever envisioned by Marx. First of all was the fact that these countries having been duly liberated from foreign colonial powers were beginning the transition from a total agrarian economy to factory production on a much less limited scale then the West and subsequently relied on the peasants as a social base of support since the infrastructure for factory capital would have to be built by them. Marx railed against the conservative �idiocy� of the peasant classes. Soviet Marxism became the dominant model for how Marxist ideology was applied in the third world.

According to the film Lenin took the multitude yearnings of an oppressed peasant class movement and turned it into a centralized bureaucratic police state. Soviet applications of Marxism reached their fruition with the cult of Stalin and his act of identifying himself with a revolutionary past by having Lenin mummified as if he were a pharaoh. Stalin�s bloody purges of all affronts to his authority centralized and modernized the Russian economy in a matter common with the historical blood lust of the Tsar Ivan Grozny, and instituted a bureaucratic communist dictatorial elite class that claimed to represent the will of masses.

Marxism came to Eastern Europe by the force of Russian tanks. Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia were brought under the Russian security alliance called the Warsaw Pact. Marxism in Asia was more or less a symptom of Soviet Communism however, the historical aspirations of those class movements were more or less framed by their own culturally unique histories, as well as their recent experience with colonialism. As such Marxist theories of self sufficiency rarely matched the Third World�s attempts to implement rural collectivist policies to stimulate production.

The feature of state bureaucratic autocracy was innate to all Marxist inspired class revolutions.

Overall, I found the video to be informative and objective.