A different side to Marx

A Different Side to Marx

By Josephine Rombouts

When one hears the name Marx, most people immediately think of opposition to capitalism and the revolutionary theory of communism. What is most important about Marx though, and not talked about enough, is his theory and explanation of these opinions on capitalism. This theory is called historical materialism. This theory proposes that all societal institutions are the result of a society's economic activity. So, all things develop based on material reasons.

Marx said that, "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness" His reasoning is that the world is built of material things, not consciousness or spiritualism. That is why anything non-material exists due to the material around it.

Religion exists and evolves based on the material things surrounding a society, hence why some religions die out. He believed religion was the result of oppressed people trying to find a meaning to a dysfunctioning society and called religion “the opium of the people.” This means that he believed religion to be a result of oppressing economic activity, and that, in his utopia, there would be no need for religion, because all humans are equal and the bourgeoisie no longer oppresses the working class.

The same thing goes for other non-material things like law. He did not believe in a universal human moral code serving as a basis for the law in a society. He actually believed that the social contract theory (a theory stating that all humans have an unspoken agreement to set aside barbaric human natures and freedoms and have a moral code in order to live in a comfortable society) was an excuse for the bourgeoisie to oppress the proletariat in a democratic capitalist society. In his eyes, the law evolves based on material circumstances, and not based on human consciousness changing.

A great example of this is women's rights. Women did not actually gain more rights in the United States because men changed their minds after the suffragette movement. In reality, women were needed in the workforce during wartime; therefore, the material circumstance (war) forced the law to change and allow women in the workspace. After wartime was over, women had proved themselves capable of labor, and there was no longer any valid reason to force women to stay at home.

This makes an interesting point because the long-accepted idea of how society works doesn't really make sense when looking at things like modern-day democracies. Before Marx, the general consensus was the theory of the social contract and that all humans have an agreed-upon moral code. However, drastic change does not occur often when there isn't a material event to instigate that change. People may believe in a cause and fight for it, but most changes to the law cannot be agreed upon within a society.

Take abortion, for instance. Abortion rights are not an agreed-upon human moral that is evolving over time. Abortion was legal and then illegal and then legal again, and now becoming more and more illegal in the United States. We are not evolving as humans to accept abortion, because even when it is legal, about half of the United States believes it should be illegal, and vice versa. Abortion rights are a mere reflection of the people in office and of the luck of those people. When Roe v Wade was overturned, this was seen as a long-awaited victory for many conservatives in office. The reason they were able to finally overturn it was that they got lucky; there were more Republican presidents able to elect supreme court judges than Democratic ones. Therefore, abortion laws are a reflection of material circumstances changing, and not an evolving human moral code.

I do think it is not one or another; material circumstances affect human consciousness, but human consciousness can affect material circumstances as well. Although I do not completely agree with Marx, I believe his theory was so important because it revealed a gray area in how our society functions. He proposed a flipped version which created two options, and when two options are created, something like the social contract, that is so widely accepted, becomes less credible as it has a competitor. So now with these two opposing views of how our society functions, it is revealed that society functions in not just a one-way streak.