BECAUSE THEY THINK THAT MAN'S PURPOSE IN LIFE IS ONLY TO PRODUCE FOOD AND OTHER BASIC NEEDS.
This is Marxism as explained by R.F. Baum:
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Commonly called historical materialism and as such given respectful attention by his apologists, it is also sometimes called the economic interpretation of history.
That last locution, however, may suggest what Marx never intended and what sort or sect of Marxists takes seriously, namely, that Marx’s is only one interpretation of history and that others are admissible. Marx advanced his interpretation as the only true one, and it is the only one that his admirers find worthy of discussion. It follows with fair coherence from his specification of man as a self-created producer of his means of subsistence. We can summarize it this way:
The means of production, i.e., the implements and techniques of production, in use at any period require for their maximum exploitation a particular social structure. Because man is foremost and essentially a producer of his means of subsistence, maximum exploitation occurs and the required social structure arises. At the same time, a superstructure of political and legal institutions, morality, and religion also arises to protect and sanctify the social structure. Thus, as Marx put it in his Paris Manuscripts, “religion, the family, the State, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular forms of production.” The whole edifice then endures without serious challenge until more efficient means of production appear. The existing social structure cramps and fetters these new means, preventing their full exploitation, whereupon, with general popular support, the community or class possessing them overthrows the social structure and its spiritual superstructure and makes itself pre-eminent. With that, a new social structure and spiritual superstructure arise. Thus, history has been a series of social revolutions triggered by improvements in the means of production.
Our summary continues:
With the rise of modern industry and private ownership of the means of production, those means and the social structure have once more come into conflict or “contradiction”. Capitalist industry has so magnified production that it can abundantly satisfy all men’s economic needs, yet by lowering wages, capitalism so impoverishes the proletarians who could be its customers and on whose labour it depends [that] the means of production are not fully exploited and proletarians’ very survival is threatened. Moreover, by concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands—“one capitalist kills many,” we read in Capital’s first volume—capitalism is eliminating small capitalists and independent tradesmen and thereby preparing an unmediated class conflict that will be more violent than any in the past. The outcome is inevitable: increasing numbers of desperate proletarians will overthrow capitalist society and install a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in which class distinction will vanish. Having brought under its control an economic system that threatened to control it, a mankind transfigured by revolutionary action will move through socialism, which rewards individuals according to their social contribution, to a purely voluntary communism based on the rule of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Thus, the economic system will become the necessary base of a “realm of freedom” in which man achieves full humanity.
As Darwin made a struggle for existence decided by natural selection the prime mover of a biological process moving toward biological perfection, so Marx made economic effort the prime mover of an historical process moving toward social perfection. . . .
Where Darwin implicitly denied the existence of a free or self-determining mind, Marx denied it explicitly. And that explicit denial, like Darwin’s implicit one, incorporates a rebound against itself, a self-cancellation, that makes Marx’s own thought as irrational or involuntary as any capitalist’s or untaught proletarian’s. If thought only rationalizes economic or class interest, must not Marx’s do the same? Of course it must. In all logic, Marx placed truth or objectivity beyond the reach of any human.
“So much for logic!” the reply may come from Marxist catechumens viewing logic as a bourgeois pseudo-science. “Was Marx right or wrong about man’s thinking?”
Marx was wrong. His mind-denying conception of human thought as a reflex of the mode of production or of class interest stands in blatant contradiction to obvious realities:
First, ideas in individual human heads always precede their objectification in the means of production or in societies or classes conscious of themselves as such. Henry Ford thought of the assembly line before he built it, and Marx laboured all his life to implant his own ideas in proletarians to make them a community conscious of itself as such. An idea comes first; the influence of its objectification comes later.
Second, men in historical periods marked by hugely different modes of production often share the same ideas; though often under other names Platonists and Sophists exist today as they did in ancient Greece. Likewise, men in different classes often share the same ideas, while men in the same class differ fundamentally. Still other men change their ideas without changing their class, or, perforce, the period in which they live. Ideas do not simply reflect historical periods’ means of production or individuals’ class membership. Contradictions of that supposed rule meet us everywhere. Under scrutiny, Marx’s irrationalist conception of human thought dissolves. Quite obvious considerations reveal, at the heart of a doctrine that in tirelessly revised interpretations gained a tight hold on countless intellectuals, an astonishing indifference not only to logic but to the plainest sort of fact. . . .
The mind-relaxing comprehensiveness of Marx’s doctrine, coupled with a promise of harmony and plenty delivered by an apparently hard-headed student of social realities, has carried many an uncritical mind along to warm agreement. To critical minds, however, the objections to it seem as numerous as they are overwhelming. Only the following will be mentioned here:
Man’s “self-creation” is simply unintelligible. Man owes his being to causes other than himself—and this powerfully suggests that the same or equally unknown causes will do much to shape his future.
That man’s production of his means of subsistence suffices to specify him cannot be believed on the strength of Marx’s bald assertion. . . .
Events in every age have falsified the notion that the cause of social and political change is change in the means of production. All the cataclysmic social, political and spiritual upheavals involved in the sequence Old Kingdom—Middle Kingdom—New Empire swept over ancient Egypt, enthroning kings and gods, while the Egyptians continued to cultivate the Nile Valley by means inherited from long-dead ancestors. No change in the means of production comes close to accounting for the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, nor, later, for the break-up of Mediaeval Christendom and the rise of nation-states. Nor for the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. One might go on for pages. One should also mention Max Weber’s total reversal of Marx’s “materialism.” Weber presented a formidable case for thinking that religious change, specifically Protestantism, accounted for modern industry itself.
Can we not yet call it obvious that in constructing his “materialist” theory of history, Marx hugely exaggerated the causal power of economic means and interests? Change in the means of production simply cannot carry the historical burden that Marx placed upon it. Other and perhaps more powerful forces manifest themselves in history’s abundance of wars and creeds, social orders and revolutions, laws, arts and sciences. The failure of historical materialism to square with historical fact directs attention to the conception of human thought that gives that doctrine its coherence and plausibility. Here we encounter what seems [to be] Marx’s most enduring legacy.
Marx’s conception of human thought bears witness to the influence of the French Enlightenment, whose naturalistic bent Marx pressed to Promethean atheism. Such luminaries of the Enlightenment as Helvetius, Condillac, Holbach, and Lamettrie, the last of whom pronounced man a machine, seem to have sensed in any idea of a free or circumstance-transcending mind more than a trace of the religion that in man’s mind had found the image of a transcendent Creator. Enlightenment thought tended in the opposite direction, and Marx, insisting that the “thought process itself is a natural process,” followed that direction all the way.
Since the deterministic consequence is profoundly anti-humanist and logically fallacious, Marx’s admirers often try to absolve Marx and Marxism of it. They commonly base this effort on a statement several times made by Marx, that man makes his own history, They ignore Marx’s conception of man as a creature specified and motivated by his urge to produce his means of subsistence. The man who in Marx’s scheme of things made his own history possessed no more freedom of thought and action than a beaver instinctively building dams or a squirrel instinctively building nuts.
SOURCE:
Baum, R. F. Doctors of Modernity: Darwin, Marx and Freud. Peru, Illinois: Sherwood, Sugden & Co.,1988.
