Thursday, January 22, 2009

A remedy, but not a permanent solution

Among one of the current conflicts within the principle of capitalism is the fact that given the ideal of the capitalist’s mind of thinking of higher profits with lower investments with their business, there will come a point wherein with all the efforts of the capitalist to increase the maximum profit of his business, from increasing work hours to replacing his men with machines, which are supposedly “more reliable and more efficient”, he will end up decreasing his total profit due to the abuse of the capitalist, as Karl Marx has pointed out with Marxism.
In the modern context of discussing Marx with its transition into imperialism, it is said and discussed in class that although Marx’s predictions were proven to be wrong by modern critics, his contribution to the world of modern political theory is nonetheless relevant in terms of criticizing capitalism and its problems towards human society. What makes Marx’s criticism of capitalism with Marxism relevant is that through pointing out the flaws of capitalism, much is remedied with regards to capitalism, thus preventing the flaws of capitalism to occur again. With this in mind, Marx actually made an effort in improving the state of capitalism though pointing out the flaws of it.
In addition, although the idea behind Marxism and Imperialism, which will be discussed later in this paper, leaves a radical impression of which is not totally new to the human being. That being said, the origin of being radical started even before Marxism has ever existed; in fact the radical approach can be rooted upon the early capitalism era, wherein the abuse of humanity prevails the most. As the radical approach is rooted upon capitalism, it is through this root, or primary cause, that the radical approach is used as a means of instigating a revolution, which is clearly seen with the birth of the French revolution. Likewise the instigation of a revolution has brought upon a progression through history, as mankind learns overtime from the good and bad points capitalism has caused. A good example of this is the existence of class struggle, as stated by Karl Marx, wherein because of a capitalist society, two clashing classes existed, which are the bourgeoise and the proletariats. Because of the oppression the bourgeoise does to the proletariats, the proletariats, through class struggle, work their way towards eliminating the bourgeoise class, which is among the key points in Marxism. Hence, the bourgeoise class, the capitalists, are the supposed “bearers of universal evil”, of which the proletariat class, the working class, has to work upon through propaganda to eliminate the evils of the bourgeoise lass, and eventually replacing capitalism. This occurred in the French revolution as the proletariat class manage to crush the bourgeoise class, which then leads us to the birth of imperialism.
Vladimir Lenin, a primary figure of imperialism said that through the abolition of the capitalist state and the creation of a new state, a state dominated by proletariats is therefore created after the elimination of the bourgeoise class and the capitalist. Through this, the state starts from scratch, and therefore reorganizes itself; as capitalism is replaced, it therefore replaces the modes, the means, and the cycle of production through a proletariat perspective. Although the idea of a state dominated by proletariats may seem good as there is no capitalists or anyone form the bourgeoise class controlling them, the idea of having a purely proletariat state can still become problematic. Despite that the proletariat is defined to be universal and progressive with our discussions in class, the problem that lies within the proletariat state is the problem of representation.
In the proletariat class, we should be aware that there are various divisions within the class and because of that it is hard to determine how to create representation, and in order to remedy this, the vanguard party is therefore formed. The vanguard party, of which represents a particular group of people from the proletariat class, exists so that the proletariat state can become stabilized and not end up in chaos, which could possibly result from the abuse of the newly-discovered freedom of the proletariat class. In the end, creating a proletariat state would not be entirely proletariat since the existence of a vanguard party being in the forefront of the proletariat state would mean that hierarchies would still exist and therefore abuses of power would still remain.
Although the conversion from a capitalist state into a proletariat state would be a great idea as it puts an end to abusive capitalists, it is not indeed a permanent solution to the proper distribution of power among the people, the proletariat class in particular, since it is realistically impossible to create absolute equality and absolute communal sharing in a proletariat community. The fall of communism in the early 1990s attest to this, as since a leader is still needed in a communist society, there are still possibilities of abuse, of which exists even with a capitalist society.

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