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Topic:
Ideas of

Critical Review of Revolutionary

Karl Marx

Submitted by: Umair Javed(Roll No: 901)

Muhammad Zohaib(1410)
Shamshad Zafar(815)
Semester:
Year:

7th
4th

Department: Political Science

Submitted to : Professor Dr. Khalid Manzhor Butt

Government College
University Lahore

Contents
Abstract...................................................................................................................... 3

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Introduction................................................................................................................ 3
Research Questions.................................................................................................... 4
Literature Review....................................................................................................... 4
Analysis...................................................................................................................... 5
Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 5
References.................................................................................................................. 6

Abstract
This project is conducted to synthesize the revolutionary trends of Karl Marx
revolutionary tenets. Marx can be counted in one of plentiful persons who
basically triggered the peoples imagination and changed the world history.
What makes the ideas more appealing to masses even after tremendous

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change in life by virtue of science? To microscopically examine the

Materialistic view of history is either appealing or fundamentally flawed.
Understanding the Marx ideas is not always simple as one thinks because his
ideas gone through so much distortion and ambiguities. It is viewed in our
research how much facet of class struggle is prevalent in entire philosophy
and supposing that society is going through class struggle. How much shift in
so called class struggle has taken place from times of Marx to modern
paradigm.

Introduction
The single goal for which Karl Marx so much endeavoured to write at such gigantic
extent was self-emancipation of working class. Inasmuch Marx ideology has gone
through extensive changes by academicians as ideologies are often interpreted by
academicians, so original ideas are often misinterpreted or distorted. There are
some inherent flaws as well as some outstanding postures which makes it really
worth to delve it.
Marx identified the aspects of modernity is surrounded by capitalism without its
logic of exploitation, but without dynamism of their own. Marxs main contribution
consisted in accounting for civil societys negative sides_ the new forms of
penetration and subjugation stretching on its terrain.
The critique of Hegels system of mediation between civil society and the state,
however led Marx to assume, erroneously, that there are no significant
countervailing tendencies to the system of needs and that function as well as the
form of mediation institution is ineffectual. Marx rejected the both Hegelian and
liberal version of political freedom that restricted political will. For him, all institution
of civil society was deemed unacceptable.
Marx ponders on social relations of production, the exploitative relations of lord and
serfs. If production is a social activity, then it follows that changes in the organization of
production will bring about changes in society, and therefore, since the essence of man is
the ensemble of the social relations, changes also in peoples beliefs, desires and conduct.
This is the core of Marxs materialist conception of history, for Marx, alienation is material
and social process. Under the shackles of capitalist society, workers are compelled to sell
their skill to capitalist without an insufficient return.
In his theory of historical materialism, revolution praxis as the source of historical creation
either drives its logic and content from the from contradiction of forces appears inexplicable
spontaneous voluntaristic activity as revolution of 1848 and 1870 show, even by this time
capitalism had not accomplished the homogeneity of class relations.

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Confronted with a situation in which social strata other than the bourgeoisie and proletariat
play a dominant role, and in which the relation between the civil society and state could not
understood through the ruling-class model, Marx tried to present the underlying social
relations and interest conflicts among the various classes as the key to political intrigue.

Marx traces a historical process of tangentially increasing capitalist control over the
circuit of capital and the commodity production financed by it, a control on capitalists'
prospects for appropriating surplus value from workers. Within the specific context of the circuit
of industrial capital, Marx asserts a correspondence between forms in which surplus value
is realized and levels ofcapital mode of production.

Research Questions

1. Why an alternative society classless society is possible?

2. Why working class has legitimate force to rule the society after the preliterate
revolution?
3. Is Marxist-Leninism diluted the pure tradition of Marxism and how far
communist revolutions in Russia and China fulfilled the Marxs goal of
liberation of working-class?
4. Why and how are surplus labor and surplus value significant to a Marxist
analysis?
5. What are major distinctions between proletariat and bourgeoisie class?

Literature Review
Marx describes the triumphs of capitalism; the creation of a world market, world
literature, and cosmopolitanism; the misery that capitalism imposes on the masses;
the class struggle between the exploiter (owners) and the exploited and dawn of a
new, classless society.( The communist Manifesto). The modern society is
germinated from ruins of feudalistic class. It has constructed new forms of struggle
and manifestations in place of old ones. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce
one hundred years, has created more massive and mightier productive forces. The
bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of
production. Capitalist bourgeoisie mercilessly exploited the proletariat. The work
carried out by the proletariat has actual use-value. The product created in the
factory (the material outcome of the owners labor) was more than value of labour
itself. On the ruins of the capitalist state, Marx wrote in The Class Struggles in
France, there would be established the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the
necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally

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As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are
products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individual who carry on
their work independently of each other. The sum of total of the labour of all these
private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. (Das Capital).
Marx cut across the whole idea of an unchanging human nature in his sixth Thesis
on Feuerbach, where he declared that Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion
into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each
single individual.
The rate of surplus value was the name Marx gave to the ratio between surplus
value and variable capital, the capital invested in labour power. This measured the
rate of exploitation, in other words the degree to which the capitalist was successful
in pumping surplus labour out of the worker.
On the ruins of the capitalist state, Marx wrote in The Class Struggles in France ,
there would be established the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary
transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally.
According to Szelenyi and Konrad, the market and state the redistributive
mechanism of state monopoly of capitalism are the two main principles of
stratification responsible for permeation of of intellectual strata between capital and
labour

Analysis
Popular notion or verdict against socialism is that it is extremely contradictory to human
nature of men. Any attempt to create a society free of poverty, exploitation and violence is
bound to run up against the fact that human beings are naturally selfish, greedy and
aggressive.

Although Marx thus rejected the notion of an unchanging human nature, he

continued to believe that human beings in widely differing societies share certain things in
common. Indeed, it is precisely these common properties which explain why human
societies change, and with them the beliefs, desires and abilities of the people composing
them. In other words, there is no such thing as human nature in the abstract. Rather, as
society changes, so also do the beliefs, desires and abilities of men and women

Conclusion
It would be extremely irresponsible today to perpetuate the image of modern
society and its alternative. Neither the structure of social system nor the social
movements in western societies conform to this overly simplified model. With
certainty, none of contemporary Marxists follow the legacy of their predecessor as
to analyze the a critical theory of society as did Marx in his own time(political

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economy). Moreover, Marx implied that an alternative to thoroughly capitalist
system must entail a complete break with bourgeois culture and institutions. The
normative contents of social life that Marx wanted to defend, but which his theory
could no longer locate imanently in civil society, where ergo carried by metaasocial,
teleological philosophy of history.

References
1- Class and Civil Society, The limits of Marxian Critical theory, Jean L. Cohen,
the university of Massachusetts Press Amherst 1982
2- The fall of Soviet communism, Jeremy Smith, Palgrave Macmillan New York,
2005
3- Karl Marx: The Legacy, David McLellan, British Broadcasting Cooperation,
1983.
4- The fallacy of Marxism, Dr. Muhmmad Rafi-ud-din, Institute of Islamic culture ,
1951
5- The Rise and Fall of Communism, Richad H. Huddelson, Westview Press, 1993