Friday, April 17, 2020

Marx’s Concept of Socialism
Peter Hudis

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
Edited by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew

Print Publication Date: Jun 2019
Subject: Sociology, Social Theory
Online Publication Date: Sep 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545.013.50

In This Article
1. The Vision of a Post-Capitalist Society in the Young Marx
2. The Impact of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy on his Concept of Socialism
3. The Vision of a New Society in Marx’s Capital
4. The 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program
5. Conclusion
References

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Abstract and Keywords

One of the most important theoretical challenges facing us is developing a viable alternative to capitalism. Achieving this requires rethinking basic premises of social theory and practice, given the difficulties of freeing humanity from such problems as alienation, class domination, and the capitalist law of value. Taking off from Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, this article explores how Marx’s critique of capital, value production, and abstract universal labor time is grounded in an emancipatory vision of a post-capitalist society—a vision that has been largely overlooked. While Marx never wrote “blueprints of the future,” the full breadth of his work as revealed in the Marx-Engels Gesaumtausgabe indicates that his vision of a post-capitalist society went further than specifying the need to abolish private property and “anarchic” exchange relations. This chapter seeks to show how Marx’s writings on this issue provide important theoretical ground for envisioning a non-capitalist future in the twenty-first century.

Keywords: socialism, value production, abstract labor, Communism, state

When Karl Marx broke from bourgeois society and became a revolutionary in the early 1840s, he joined an already-existing socialist movement that long predated his entrance upon the political and ideological scene. Neither he nor any other radical intellectual of the time invented the idea of socialism and Communism. A general notion of an alternative to capitalism, even if vague and misdirected, was already in circulation. It consisted of replacing an anarchic, market-driven competitive society with a planned, organized one controlled by the working class. It may seem that Marx had little to add to this notion, since he refrained from speculating about the future and sharply criticized the utopian socialists who spent their time doing so. Moreover, since Marx’s theoretical contribution consisted of an extended critique of the existing capitalist mode of production and he wrote relatively little about post-capitalist society, it may appear that his work has little to offer those seeking to develop a viable alternative to capitalism in the twenty-first century. However, as with so much in life, the appearance is deceptive

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