Reflection On “Marx For Beginners”
Today, we as students inside our learning environment would never be able to even imagine placing herself or himself in such contra-culture danger as Karl Marx. Marx was a true “tough” guy in writing and publishing his theories, his own true definition of his knowledge, in the face of exclusion and death by the vehemently authoritative government and religion state in his era. Even in the most despair could he write to his friends that “You will have seen from my letters that, as usual when I am right in the shit myself and not merely hearing about it from a distance, I show complete indifference.”
Often his own suffering came from his own troubling obsessions over why other people were suffering, and as discussed in class, this led to his theoretical reinforcement of dialectics to argue how these realities existed. Marx argued that such an archaic form of society as feudalism had only given light towards the more moderately “accepted” form of exploitation in capitalism. This challenges how these oppressors were able to “alienate” themselves from the workers with capitalist morals to a point where “the more a worker produces, the less that he can consume; the more value he creates, the less value he has.” The result is that “the deepest essence of man, his creative act, has been transformed into a possession...”
As an elementary school student, I had read Orwell’s Animal Farm, and often some concepts from this story challenged some ideas presented with the Marx theories, as I was presented with two seemingly opposing takes on communism. However, the issue returned to the concept of “power,” and within some research, Animal Farm was rather an attack on “Stalinism” and the designation of “who is worthy of power,” or maybe, “who gives themselves their power.” This led to some further challenges with some of Marx’s ideas, in particular the notion of “monopolizing the bank.” I find some challenges with any sort of monopolization, that there are moral concerns with the freedom to business and competition, and though I understand that Marx argues against any sort of exploitation, I am unsure if there would ever be a “proper” designation of power over any sort of monopoly, and it might even run the risk of doing the complete opposite of Marx’s theories.
Marx was a deductive genius in theorizing his views with such long manuscripts that almost never deviated from a core focus. The most important thing that anyone can learn from Karl Marx is to understand his example as a revolutionary, and as generations are continually influenced by his works, it can challenge us to find what is right in our own lives and to change society, no matter how big or how small, and to understand global perspective. The most important realization within reading was that “the class struggle isn’t just Marx’s invention. It has always existed (and maybe always will) ever since the world began.” This, to my perspective, could be the result that any of us will never be able to truly know how to use power just because of the needs and wants that anyone will ever have in their lifetimes. Even upon writing this paper, I am thinking of all the workers I may as well have possibly “exploited” (workers in paper mills, the factories overseas that have made the parts for this computer, etc.) just to produce my research. In this haunting muse, it helps me understand just that much more importantly why the “global economy” will continually influence my understandings of this society, and with the seemingly educational revolution of only the past half-century of universities and public schools, it now lies critically apparent that there absolutely has to be this understanding to everyone now, to everyone in the future, if we are to shape a decent concept of humanity and end oppressively capitalist societies.
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