Question

Can someone please give me a quick summary of Marxism and its main concepts..?

Answer 1

Marxism begins with the idea that the source of all value is human labor, for example your nice yard is the result of the labor of either yourself or your gardener, and your car is the result of the labor of the factory workers who assembled it.

As such, it follows (Marx says) that laborers are responsible for all the fruits of civilization. The people who merely direct that labor -- the capitalists, managers, aristocrats -- are at best merely assistants that help labor achieve what it does.

We observe, nevertheless, that the directors -- capitalists -- are generally better paid and have more influence than the laborers. Marx concludes this is just a leftover of history. That in the past, perhaps, labor was not sufficiently educated and sophisticated to guide itself, and therefore employed capitalists to do the job, much as someone newly arrived in a city might employe a dating service to find dates, at first. The capitalists exploited this need of labor, and its naivete, to bleed off more than its proper share of the fruits of labor, and this is how capitalists got rich. They now employe some of their (unearned) wealth to produce propaganda to convince labor it's too stupid to govern itself, and needs capitalists more than it does. Wars are a consequence of one small set of capitalists fighting with another over labor resources -- labor itself would have no reason to fight wars.

In the future, however, when labor is educated and informed, it wil throw off the burden of supporting a fat cat layer of lazy capiatlists, and will own and keep the fruits of its labor for itself. We'll need far fewer capitalists and managers, and most people will be laborers, but labor will pay very well, so everyone will be rich, and all the children will be above average, and there'll be no more wars.

The obvious criticism of Marxism is that it entirely ignores the importance of good ideas and good leadership in the success of civilization. Marxism says the labor of a 3-year-old to make a mud pie produces exactly as much value as the labor of a Cordon Bleu chef to make a glorious death by chocolate dessert, and is consequently bewildered by the fact that free people, given a free choice, consistently offer to pay more for exquisite desserts prepared by talented bakers than mud pies made by children.

Marxism is bewildered by why Steve Jobs is necessary to the success of Apple. It proposes that Apple would be just as successful if they had stuck to iMacs and worked hard, and that Steve Job's lonely inventive brilliance in coming up with the idea of the iPod and iPhone were either (1) not very important, or (2) would have been imagined by some assembly worker in China working for Apple anyway.

Answer 2

Wow thanks..great