brilliance of the famous communication expert,

Marshall McLuhan, who predicted the world will

become smaller until we all become part of what
he called the GLOBAL VILLAGE. He coined the
term years before the birth of the Internet – the
media that allowed people from around the world
to live as if they all belong to a village –
communicating in real time despite the distance.
Who could have thought that what McLuhan said in
his time would still be happening years after his
conception of a brilliant idea?”
discovered a person who, like Marshall
McLuhan, challenged the world not only
with his brilliant mind but also with
revolutionary ideas which are still
happening until now, 123 years after his
death and 166 years after the publication of
his most famous document, The Communist
Manifesto, which he wrote at the age of
30.”
Good morning! After talking about
Asian Philosophy where we were introduced to the
distinctive values and ways of thinking among the
people of Asia, let me welcome you to a totally
different topic today – the philosophy and
philosopher that challenged the whole world in the
middle of the 1800s and still challenging the
different classes in the society today.
MARXISM :
THE FOUNDATION
OF COMMUNIST
THOUGHTS
Key terms and names

 Capitalism
 Labour
 Dialectical materialism
 Historical materialism
 Communist Manifesto
 Alienation
 Class struggle
 Exploitation


Key names

 Karl Marx
 Hegel
 Ludwig Feuerbach
 Frederick Engels

Let me begin with the END
of this report:
THE IMPLICATION
FOR EDUCATION
 We are all educators. A closer look
at what we do would make us
realize that we are, after all, part of
the working class.
 Our understanding of the roles we
play at work, as teachers, public
servants, or employees can help us
find creative ways on how to carry
out our duties at work without
“losing ourselves.”
Examples:

 National
context
 Personal level
 “Tama na, sobra na.
Gutom na kami!”

Perfecto
Versola68-year-old
His home could only fit a 2m x 3m
flooring made of old tabla (wood) and a
small antique closet.

Mang Pering was among the 2,000 sugar

farm workers from the United Luisita
Workers Union (ULWU) staged a
plantation-wide strike on November 16,
2004.

acienda Luisita Massacre

MANILA, Philippines—Five years after


the bloody Hacienda Luisita

massacre, justice has yet to be
served to the victims and their
families.
Hacienda Luisita massacre remembered

By Abigail Kwok
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 14:05:00 11/16/2009
 “ If we won ’ t demand , we
won ’ t get what
we deserve .”

Part-time ESL Instructor

International Language Study Institute

January 5, 2010

Letter --- 4 conditions

January 18, 2010

 Capitali
Exploitat
sm
ion Class struggle
Understanding Karl Marx’s ideas will
inspire us to step backward and REFLECT
on our own “struggle” at our workplace
Inspire us not just
to“interpret the world,”
but also to “change the
world” through
education.
Communism

 Any social system in which all

property, or at least all productive
property, is owned by the group,
or community, instead of by
individuals (Mc Fadden, 1982).
 A society in which each person
should contribute according to
their ability and receive according
to their need (Wolff, 2008).
 A classless society with equal
KARL HEINRICH MARX
Father of
communist
thoughts
philosopher
Revolutionary communis

February 1948
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19480223,00.html
Family Background

 Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in

Trier, an ancient cathedral town in
the German Rhineland. Both his
parents were Jewish, the
descendants of many generations
of rabbis.
 His father, Heinrich Marx, a
successful legal official, was a
moderate liberal with a deep faith
in the power of reason.
 Family Background

 The relationship between father and

son was close: Marx carried a
picture of Heinrich till his death,
when it was buried with him.
 Karl’s mother, Henrietta Marx, who
had emigrated from Holland to
Prussia, never learned to read and
write German(at least accdng. to
some evidence).
 Karl has three sisters: Sophie, Emilie
Educational Background

 Educated at the high school in Trier,

he received a liberal education with
a strong emphasis on the classics.
He does not seem to have been an
outstanding pupil, and his
 surviving school essays give little
hint of his future greatness.
qIn 1835 Marx went to Bonn
University to study law.
 Like his fellow students, he got drunk,
ran up debts, fought duels, and even
spent a night in jail for brawling.
 At 17 years old, Karl concentrated on
“fun and games” instead of studies.
 A taste for writing bad romantic poems
(only some of which, thankfully, have
survived)
 was made worse when he became
secretly engaged to Jenny von
Westphalen during the summer
vacation of 1836. Jenny was four
years his senior, from a higher social
bracket.
 There was opposition to the match
from both their parents. Some of the
von Westphalens were extreme
reactionaries (Jenny’s brother
became a Prussian cabinet minister in
the 1850s), while Heinrich Marx was
afraid that his son’s ‘demonic spirit’
would lead them to disaster. ‘Will
you ever—and that is not the
least painful doubt of my heart—
will you ever be capable of truly
human, domestic happiness?’
This parental opposition may help to
explain why it was seven years before
 While on honeymoon with Jenny at
Kreuznachin March 1843, Marx
wrote a manuscript called
Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy. It was not
published until 1927.
 Marx’s links with his family were
virtually broken off after his
father’s death in May 1838. He
does not seem to have got on very
well with his mother, although she
provided him with quite large sums
of money over the years.
 Marx seems to have hoped to pursue a
career as a professional philosopher.
He devoted much time to studying
the early Greek thinkers, and in April
1841 received his doctorate for a
thesis entitled ‘Difference Between
the Democritean and Epicurean
Philosophy of Nature’. Although
obscurely written, and strongly
Hegelian, the thesis shows Marx’s
growing impatience with the highly
idealistic philosophy of his friend
Bruno Bauer, who sought to reduce
everything to human consciousness.
Personal and Family Life

 Had a teaching career in 1941

 Attempted a career in journalism; he
wrote for The Rhineland Gazette
inn 1942.
 Within 6 months, the government
suppressed the paper. His
journalistic career in the
newspaper field had lasted just
about 6 months.
 He literally “bounced around”
 Marx lived by “borrowing” money
from friends and relatives and even
pawning his wedding presents.
 Karl Marx and Jenny had extreme
misfortune in the family. Three of
their 6 children died within a year
of birth.
 The Marx family life in London was
one of extreme poverty.
 Karl Marx usually spent from 9 a.m. till
7 p.m. writing in the British museum
(one of the world’s largest libraries).
 Referring to his major work Capital,
Jenny, his wife is credited with saying
that no one ever wrote about money
and had so little of it as her husband.
 Factually, the Marx family survived
primarily because of the never-ending
generosity of Frederick Engels, Karl’s
friend and collaborator.
 The only time that Marx ever really
earned any money to support his
family was during a ten-year period
from 1851-1861. Back then, he
wrote for the New York Tribune (the
largest newspaper in the US with a
circulation of 200,000.)
 In later years, the circulation of the
New York Tribune declined. Marx’s
salary was cut in half and he got
paid only for the articles chosen for
 Marx even had to write to Engels on
January 21, 1859, to request for
enough postage money to send the
manuscript of his principal work,
Capital, to the publisher.
 Marx’s wife died on Dec. 2, 1881.
 Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883.
 Frederick Engels delivered the
eulogies at the graves of both Karl
Marx and his wife.
Marx’s IDEAS
 According to Aristotle, everything in the
world had a purpose.
 That purpose gave the thing its place in
the world. So, for example, he argued
that bodies were naturally at rest.
Motion, change, was abnormal,
something which happened when
bodies were disturbed, shaken out of
their natural places. And when
disturbed, bodies would move back
to their natural places, where they
would be, once again, at rest.
 This way of looking at the world served
two purposes.
 First,
it provided a sophisticated
version of the Christian myth, of
the belief that the universe and
everything in it had been created
by God. For the idea that
everything has a purpose implies
that it fits into a design, a design
made by an all-powerful, all-
knowing God with some particular
end in view.
 Secondly, it corresponded to the
structure of feudal society, in which
everyone had their place, whether
nobleman, guildman or serf, a place
into which you were born and in
which your children would follow. At
the apex of the feudal system stood
the king, just as God was at the
centre of the universe. According to
this system of ideas, the stable and
harmonious feudal order, in which
everyone had their place, mirrored
the stability and harmony of God’s
universe.
Hegel, Feuerbach and
Marx
HEGEL: Thoughts create reality. =
God created the world.
MARX: Thoughts reflect the world
and do NOT CREATE it.
 MARX: Hegel fell into the illusion of
conceiving the real as a product of
illusion.
 FEUERBACH: Religion takes what
are human powers – the ability to
think, to act on and change the world,
and so on --- and transfers them to an
imaginary being, God.

“Religion is the opium
of the people.”
 But two developments began to
challenge this system of ideas: the
growth of science and the
growth of a new class. The new
traders and manufacturers, the
new bourgeoisie, derived their
power, not from the armed men
they could command or the land
that they owned, but from their
control of money, ‘capital’, and
 The new science was materialistic.
Its theories involved no purpose,
no design, no God.
 Souls, angels, devils and God himself
—everything that lacked a body,
that had a purely ‘spiritual’
existence—did not exist at all.
Marx: LABOUR IS THE ESSENCE OF


MAN AND THE BASIS OF SOCIETY

(Callinicos, p. 66).
 Man is a labouring animal. ‘It is just
in his work upon the objective
world…that man proves himself to
be a species being. This production
is his active species life. Through
this production, nature appears as
his work and his reality’
  MARX:
 “The animal is immediately one with its
life activity. It does not distinguish
itself from it. It is its life
activity. Man makes his life activity
itself the object of his will and of
his consciousness. He has conscious
life activity… Conscious life
activity distinguishes man
immediately from animal life activity
(CW iii 276).”
The Beehive analogy
 A beehive is a case of a highly organised division of
labour in which each bee has its allotted task to
fulfill in the hive’s economy. But the bees’ work is
repetitive. It has not changed for many millions of
years. What a bee can do is limited in advance to a
very narrow range of activities determined by its
genetic make-up.

 Human beings are not subject to this limitation. They
can change, and improve on, their methods of
production. They are able to do this because of
their superior mental equipment. Human beings
possess the power of reflection. They can, in other
words, step back from what they are doing,
and compare it with other ways of achieving
the same objective. They can thus criticise
and improve on what they are doing. They
can even think up new goals to pursue
 MY OWN THOUGHTS: As human
beings, we have the power to reflect.
Perhaps we have the same goals;
However, although our goals are the
same, we have our own different
ways of accomplishing them. And
reflection on what we already did in
the past would guide us in choosing
the path that we want to take in order
to accomplish these goals. That’s the
good thing about men, according to
Karl Marx. We are not like bees
which do their tasks repetitively
every single day.
 Marx is careful to stress that
consciousness is inseparable
from the productive activity in
which human beings engage.
 MARX:
 “It is not consciousness of men
that determines their being, but, on
the contrary, their social being which
determines their consciousness”
(Callinicos, p. 64).

 If follows that human beings are
fundamentally social creatures. It
doesn’t make any sense to
conceive of people as existing
outside society.
 If production is the most
fundamental human activity, it
follows that when we analyse
society, we should give most
attention to the way in which
Materialism

 Materialism, the belief that

thoughts reflect the world, and
does not create it, lay at the basis
of his creation of history.”

What is history?
 

 MARX:
 “The history of all
hitherto existing society
is the history of class
struggle.”

 MARX: Human beings are first and
foremost, PRODUCERS.
 Their production has two aspects,
material and social.
 Firstly, it is the activity through which
men and women seek to meet their
needs by acting on and transforming
nature. This implies a certain
organisation of producti on, the
possession of the appropriate tools,
and so on.
 Secondly, production is a social
process, in which people cooperate
to produce the things they need. 
 ‘Labour’, he writes, ‘is first of all a
process between man and nature, a
process by which man, through his
own actions, mediates, regulates and
controls the metabolism between
himself and nature’.
 Changes in the labour process enable
us to produce more efficiently, and
thereby to expand our control over
nature.
 To understand what Marx meant by the
relations of production we have to
distinguish between two senses in
which production is social. 
 First,
work is necessarily a social
activity since it depends upon the
cooperation of a number of
individuals in order to achieve a
common goal. In this respect, the
relationships between individuals
are determined by the material
constraints of producing in a
certain way. The allocation of tasks
to the producers will reflect the
  Relations of production are, in class
society, ‘not relations between
individual and individual, but
between worker and capitalist,
between farmer and landlord, etc’.

 Marx argues
that we cannot
understand the
nature of
production, and
therefore the
nature of
society,
without
examining who
controls the
means of
production (p.
85).
  Marx argues that we cannot understand the nature of
production, and therefore the nature of society,
without examining who controls the means of
production. For two reasons. First, once we have
got beyond the most primitive forms of agriculture,
no labour process can take place without means of
production. Indeed, even slash and burn agriculture
depends on having relatively free access to land.

 Secondly, the distribution of the means of production
provides the key to the division of society into
classes. For there is no inherent necessity in the
labour process which requires that the producers,
those who do the actual work, should control the
means of production, the tools and raw materials
with which they work.
 Class society rests on exploitation,
that is, on the appropriation of
surplus labour by a minority who
control the means of production.
However, in the early phases of
human development, what Marx
called ‘primitive communism’, in
which the means of production
were owned in common, there was
little or no surplus labour. Almost
all the working day was taken up
 It was only thus, through the
creation of a working class owning
nothing but their ability to work,
their labour power, that the
capitalist mode of production could
develop.

 The capitalist mode of production
depends upon the separation of the
direct producer from the means of
production, which are controlled by a
small group of capitalists.
 For the worker, the alternative to
selling his or her labour power to the
capitalist is ultimately starvation.
 The capitalist uses his control of the
means of production to force people
to work for him, and, once he has
employed them, to work longer than
is necessary to replace their wages,
thus creating surplus labour.
 Exploitation in this case depends, in
the first instance, on the property
owner’s economic power, and not
on his monopoly of violence.
Because there is no physical
compulsion involved, because the
worker is legally free, and his or
her agreement to work for the
capitalist is apparently quite
voluntary, exploitation is here
  MY OWN THOUGHTS: When my
employer said, “Those who want to
go may go. Bukas ang pinto sa
paglabas n’yo.”
 Some would even say, “If you don’t
like it here, then you may leave.”


 This is concealed exploitation. 

ALIENATION

 For a moment, though, leave aside

the exploitation. Leave aside the
endemic poverty, leave aside the
cyclical crises. There remains the
fact that capitalism perverts
human nature. Marx called this
perversion "alienation."

 What does this mean? Keep in mind
that creative, social labour is
what makes us human in the
first place -- work, in other words.
Under capitalism, however, we
don't have any real control over
our work. So the very thing that
makes us human, is the thing this
system takes from us.
 Firstly, the fact that labour is external to the
worker -- i.e., does not belong to his essential
being; that he, therefore, does not confirm
himself in his work, but denies himself, feels
miserable and not happy, does not develop
free mental and physical energy, but
mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence,
the worker feels himself only when he is not
working; when he is working, he does not feel
himself. He is at home when he is not
working, and not at home when he is
working. His labour is, therefore, not
voluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is,
therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but a
mere means to satisfy needs outside itself.
Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by
 Capitalistcrisis is not just an
impersonal economic process. It
means mass unemployment in the
rich countries, and famine and
epidemics in many parts of the
Third World.

Communism can only
happen when
capitalism collapsed.
 What Marx meant was this: Workers, according to the
view he is attacking, are too debased and corrupt
to do anything about capitalism. This situation will
change only under socialism, which will create a
new sort of human being, one that no longer suffers
from the defects of people under capitalism. But
this seems a counsel of despair. How will socialism
ever be achieved if capitalism is able to prevent the
masses from recognising that their interest lies in
its abolition? Only if an enlightened minority of
socialists who are somehow exempt from the
conditioning of capitalism transform society for the
masses. This apparently highly materialist view
thus collapses into idealism, since it supposes that
there are people who have risen above the
pressures of bourgeois society, and therefore above
the class struggle .

 Workers are not simply passively
shaped by society. Capitalism,
because it is a form of society based
on exploitation, that is, on the
contradiction between capital and
labour, gives rise to the class
struggle. The effect of this struggle is
to transform the working class. The
pressure of the battle with the
employer forces workers to organise
collectively, and to behave
increasingly as a class conscious of
its interest in transforming society.
The experience of struggle
 Theclass struggle is also decisive in
establishing socialism. Marx did not
believe that capitalism would
collapse under the pressure of its
contradictions. The victory of the
working class was in no sense
inevitable. The outcome of his
dialectic, unlike Hegel’s, was
not predetermined in advance.
Everything depended
ultimately on the
  ‘Menmake their own history, but
they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under
circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under
circumstances directly
encountered, given and
transmitted from the past’.

DIALECTICAL

 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
MATERIALISM
 Matter is self-  Focused on class
sufficient struggle and
 Matter needs no God exploitation in past
to create it. and present society
 It needs no God, as a and on the manner
Prime Mover, to
bestow any and all in which society is
forms of motion, irresistibly evolving
such as life, upon it. toward ideal
 It needs to God, as an communist society.
intelligent designer,
to account for the
order in the

 DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM


 

 Atheistic both in its  The heart and soul of

content and its modern
purpose communism
Thank you!