I come forth today with the proposition that Marxism, as an approach to political knowledge, is the most accurate in understanding social phenomenon and social problems as well as providing solutions to remedy said problems. It is important to note right off the bat that this is not a debate about the Soviet Union, or any historical state that claimed to be Marxist. References can be made if the context calls for illustration, but fundamentally this is not a discussion about Marxism as a political practice, but rather as a method of analysis.
First off, I will start out with a materialist, determinist view of the individual. There honestly isn’t too much literature on this matter that is explicitly Marxist as far as I know, as most analysis jumps straight to studying class interactions. However, considering that my opponent is a libertarian and a dominant aspect of most libertarian philosophies is the idea that the individual is an agent of free will and has agency in all things, I wish to jump the gun a bit and present the view that the individual shouldn’t be analyzed in such a matter. Believing that you’re in control of your own destiny and you can do what you want may be a good philosophy in approaching problems in your own life, it is fundamentally shallow when it comes to analyzing society and makes no significant predictions of any sort.
Accepting materialism (ignoring ideas of spirits and whatnot), I think it is perfectly valid to say that the human brain is fundamentally a computer made out of mush. An extremely complicated computer, yes, but a computer still. It has a physical structure which receives input, processes that input, and produces an output. A powerful being that completely understood the physical structure of the brain and how it processes information could, in theory, insert an input and then predict beforehand what the output would be. This is determinism.
From this acknowledgement, we can identify what determines how people act, and it comes down to two factors: Genetics and social environment. Genetics determine the brain hardware, and social environment determines the inputs (it also affects the hardware, but that’s a complication I won’t pursue). This has interesting implications, as we can now make some predictions, namely that people that grow up and experience similar social environments will adopt similar thoughts, actions and other brain ‘output’. This should strike everyone as true. It is no coincident that the majority of people that happen to be Christian also grew up in Christian homes!
This draws a significant contrast to concepts of ‘free will’, where if we accept the concept as a method of analysis, we would expect to see no correlation between social environment and behavior. If every individual is truly and completely free to make his own choices, why do we constantly see Black people making the wrong choices out or proportion to the rest of society? Without resorting to social environment factors, the only other conclusion is racism as far as I can see.
The moderate libertarian may, at this point, say that obviously social conditions affect what decisions individuals make, but when you come down to the nitty-gritty, the person can make any decision he wants. This is also wrong and an intellectual cope-out, which I’ll explain later but I first want to emphasize the point that even if that point was correct, it would still give credence to Marxist analysis. Although ‘free-will’ may provide variation between individuals, there is still enough correlation to take a group of individuals and study them as a collective or as a class, almost as if you’re taking an average (except the factors being studied are not quantities).
The confusion that arises with individual determinism is largely due to individuals thinking “I’m more than just a series of calculations, as I can hear myself rationalizing right now, and I am obviously in control of that rationalizing”. The confusion is due to taking two different approaches to understanding thought. The person in my example is using the intentional approach to understanding agency (ability to affect change) of the individual, where as I’m taking the physical approach; Both are explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
That was longer than expected. But time to move on to more orthodox Marxism. Due to individuals being mostly by-products of their social environment, the best way to understand society is to study that environment and analysis human behavior as reactions to their environment. This is essentially the foundation of all things Marxist. In the capitalist world, the most pressing aspect of one’s social environment tends to be his economic environment, and it was this belief that led to Marx’s own Historical Materialism.
This means that societies and individuals are formed according to their relation to each other in the economic world. Workers that do not own capital but instead sell their labour are in a class subordinate to those that do own capital. Those that control the factors of production in any society will also control the political sphere of society as well. In terms of gender roles, societies where men are the main breadwinners in the economic sphere tend to be largely patriarchic in all matters. On the flip side, societies where both women and men contribute roughly equally in economic life, also tend to be more egalitarian in all social matters. Again, this is an aspect of Marxist thought that is predictive and useful to understanding how society works.
Since these classes (individuals who share a similar relation to economic forces) have different interests, there is bound to be political tension between these classes and naturally the most powerful class (the capitalists) will exploit those on the bottom as much as they can for their own benefit. Not only economically, but politically as well through concepts like hegemony (Where the upper classes create a cultural ‘myth’ or set of ideas that makes the lower classes act against their own interests, examples being warfare in general and forms of nationalism).
Again, this accurately explains phenomenon such as poverty cycles, relative immobility between social classes, and cultural differences that exist between classes.
I’ll expand further on some aspects of modern Marxist thought later if it proves relevant, but I think I already wrote too much.