Utopian Socialism and Marxism: Key Concepts and Thinkers
Utopian Socialism
Henri de Saint-Simon
“Property must be socialized, and inheritance rights removed.” All individuals must produce according to their abilities and be rewarded according to their capacity to make a difference. This capacity does not lead to classicism based on wealth disparity. Thus, the government proposed by Saint-Simon would become a dictatorship of the most qualified, who would lead the people scientifically.
Charles Fourier
His most important social idea is embodied in the *phalansteries*, or cooperative societies, in which every individual will be given the opportunity to find the activity they are most welcome in. Whatever their vocation, they will work in this way. Far from being considered a slave, the individual will become a social and human being.
Robert Owen
A precursor of labor law, he tried to create the colony of Harmony, based on a mixed economy, but failed.
The Trade Unions
From 1830, the federation of all trade unions in a trade union without violence, through the general strike, performed social demands. This will be the origin of cooperative unions. However, be aware of the reform of wages to a transformation of society, as advocated by revolutionary syndicalism.
Marx
Socialist Theory of Knowledge or Materialism
Dialectic applied to material reality.
Influences: Hegel (dialectics), Fourier (Socialism), Saint-Simon (materialism).
Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of a material nature obey rules (regarding the matter) to understand reality. He analyzed England due to the Industrial Revolution.
Dialectical Materialism
A movement of sharp opposition between thesis and antithesis, supported by the following laws:
- Law of reciprocal action of matter and universal connectivity.
- Universal law of change and constant development of matter.
- Law of qualitative change.
- Act of struggle of opposites.
- The law of negation or overcoming dialectics.
Historical Materialism
It is an extension of dialectical materialism in the field of human history, with three basic laws:
- History is explicable by laws.
- The whole history of mankind is the history of class struggle (it is the engine of history, transforming the historical dialectic of quantity into quality through processes of resistance and rupture, evolving to historical upper stages. However, once communism is achieved, this process reaches its end).
- The driving forces of historical development are the economic and material forces of human life (infrastructure).
Ideology
It is a false consciousness to believe that the thoughts, ideas, and beliefs of human beings come from the mind due to free intellectual activity.
The role of ideology is to try to justify and perpetuate the economic situation that originates it and on which it is based.
Infrastructure
The set of material elements that are essential to the functioning and evolution of a society is made up of the economy.
Superstructure
A set of ideas and beliefs of a social, political, religious, legal, philosophical, etc. nature, which is organized by human relationships and is constituted by ideology.
Alienation
Means dispossession, the loss of something that belongs to us, and, by extension, is a false consciousness. In the capitalist economy, it means that the worker is deprived of the fruits of their labor.
Economic Alienation
Exploitation of workers, where the human realm is changed by the realm of things. The goal of Marx is the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
Social Alienation
It is the division of society into classes: upper and lower (based on material possession). However, the Marxist goal is the elimination of classes.
Political Alienation
The structure of the state in which one commands and the other obeys. The ultimate aim of Marx is to eliminate all sorts of states and convert the entire world into the homeland of mankind.
Religious Alienation
Escape from reality into a transcendent world to serve as a consolation before difficult situations. However, for Marx, “God does not exist, and religion is the opium of the people,” as it eliminates the revolutionary attitude and the liberation of human beings.
Productive Forces
Formed by those means, instruments, and the very human activity through which individuals are involved in production. That is, the productive force is human and is a historical constant.
Production Relations
Consist of various forms that the productive forces have adopted throughout history.
Merchandise
The capitalist process focuses on this concept: everything that is bought and sold.
Use Values
What a thing or object is worth in itself or in connection with satisfying a human need.
Exchange Values
Consist of the price to acquire those objects or activities insofar as they are subject to the law of supply and demand.
Class Struggle
It is the effort undertaken by the dominated classes to escape from the economic and social conditions imposed on them by the ruling classes. This struggle is the motor of history, then it becomes the war of all against all.
Capital Gain
The capitalist’s gain at the expense of the workers because if the capitalist does not get this gain, he is ruined and becomes a proletarian.
Crisis of Capitalism
The proletarians dispossess their owners, leading to the disappearance of the capitalist economy, which will be replaced by a socialist one.