Motivation

The global economic crisis that was triggered by the financial crisis in the United States in 2007 has revived political movements critical of many harmful aspects of the capitalist system, like income and wealth inequality, unjust burdens of student debt, disparity in access to housing and health care, racial oppression and discrimination of immigrants, unequal trade and investment treaties, and policies of economic austerity. Parallel with the growth of such political movements has been a growing interest – among activists, scholars and the general public – in currents of critical social and political thought that can make sense of such issues and offer alternatives to the unjust and exploitative capitalist-imperialist system. It is in this context that there has been a revival of interest in Marxism, one of the most consistently radical strands of critical social thought, one moreover, that offers a coherent and comprehensive framework for understanding the social world we live in.

Marxism is a creative synthesis of three strands of nineteenth-century European thought – classical German philosophy, British political economy and French socialism. It offers a theory of history, referred to as the materialist conception of history or historical materialism, which puts an understanding of the material conditions of life at the centre of historical analysis. To understand both the structure of society at a point in time and the logic of large-scale historical change, Marxism asks us to start from an understanding of how the production and reproduction of material life is organized. In studying the production and reproduction of material life, Marxism pays attention to both technology, what it calls the forces of production, and the relationships people enter into during the process of production, which it calls the relations of production. Starting from the relations of production, it explains the structure of political and legal institutions of modern, bourgeois society; and, starting from the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, which is expressed through and in the conflicts of fundamental social classes, it explains large-scale historical change in the political and social domains of life.

Guided by this powerful theory of history, which he had developed in the first phase of his studies in the mid-nineteenth century, Marx spent the rest of his life developing a detailed analysis of the production and reproduction of material life in capitalist economies.