Okay, so I saw a discussion online claiming no proper dumbed down explanations of Marxism exist, and that the ideology only spreads through the use of massive academic speak that people don't understand, and as such, the ideas only remain accessible to an educated elite and not the masses. The libertarian capitalists also complained that the reason they hide behind complexity is because the ideas fall on their face when boiled down to their component parts. While I'm not a fan of Marxism myself, it does have philosophical value at least, and I'd like to at least take a crack at dumbing it down in a way that people understand.
So...a lot of capitalists see capitalism as nature. However, no, capitalism was designed and put into place around 200-250 years ago at the end of the age of monarchies and feudalism. The elites wanted another system to work in a more democratic age, and a new system of justifying most of the wealth going to them since they couldnt just point to the divine right of kings any more.
Capitalism was the answer. Through the enclosure movement, capitalists privatized all of the land, and the serfs, as well as the middle class who worked in guilds, were displaced, forced to relocate to cities, and take jobs in factories.
Taking a job, ie, doing wage labor, involved being hired by an employer. While free markets claim to be fair and equal, in reality, they are not. For reasons I often explain in my own ideology, people are forced to take jobs to survive. The economy is a numbers game, enforced by "reserve army of labor", where the number of workers typically outnumbers the number of jobs. Think of it like a game of musical chairs. You got 10 people competing for 9 chairs. And we set up a system where everyone NEEDS a chair. The one guy who doesnt have a chair is basically screwed and forced to live in poverty, while the system blames them for being lazy or something.
The fear of being the odd one out keeps the other 9 in line, because they can be replaced at any time, by the one guy without the chair, who is so desperate he will do anything to get a chair. Chairs being jobs here.
This makes workers submit to hierarchical business arrangements in which bosses rule like dictators. Boss says what to do, workers do what they're told, for fear of losing their jobs (chairs) if they don't. Now, where Marx differs from me is that while I criticize the system of wage labor at its core, believing that forcing people to participate is an act of roundabout slavery that we don't call that, Marx's critique is a bit different. His problem isn't work itself, but "alienation". What's alienation? It's the idea of being stripped of all autonomy and decision making power in the work force, and being forced to live according to the commands of a dictator. For Marx, the problem isn't people being forced to work in the first place, he has a problem with the structure of work. He believed that workers should be in charge of their workplaces.
He also believed that the only way to solve capitalism was to abolish it. This was because back then, capitalism was still so new and we were just after the period in which we had all these revolutions overthrowing monarchies and feudalism and establishing democracies and capitalism, and he believed that the workers should rise up and overthrow the ownership class who owns the means of production, ie, all the workplaces, since most companies are owned by the top 1-2% of the population or so.
Marx also had problems with that system of ownership. Along side capitalism is a work ethic based in protestantism that typically links the right to property with work. I'm quite critical of this system in my own ideology, but again, with Marx the framing was a bit different. His problem isnt work. If anything, he believed more fiercely in the work ethic than a lot of capitalists do. He believed that the workers did all the work, and then the owners of the companies just sat on their laurels, collected all the profits, and paid workers the minimum. He's not necessarily wrong, but that's where his critique of the system stops as well. As such, he was more focused on overthrowing this ownership class of parasites who he called the "bourgeoisie", and handing over the ownership of the companies (means of production) to workers (proletariat).
And again, he thought the way to do this was through a worker revolution where the workers rose up, overthrew the existing order, and handed everything over to the workers. Then the workers governed things democratically for a while and he believed eventually the state would wither away (because he saw its sole purpose of existing to protect the privileges of the ownership class) and then we'd be left with "communism" (which was a form of anarchist collectivism).
I know this seems highly technical and academic, but that's the simple explanation.
To make it even simpler:
250 years ago we made a system where the rich own everything to replace another system where the rich owned everything.
We systemically deny people resources and force them to work.
They're forced to work out of desperation.
Most workplaces are owned by very few people. They control almost all wealth in society and rule over the workers with an iron fist. They also collect all the profits while leaving workers with almost nothing despite the workers making everything in the first place.
He believed workers should rise up and overthrow the system, putting all of the businesses in the hands of the workers who worked them, and then the state would eventually disappear.
That's the TLDR.
Obviously I dont agree with such a system. My own critiques and solutions are a bit different. My own criticism is that people are forced to work in the first place, and I'd rather redistribute wealth via a UBI and other social safety nets to fix that. I dont care as much about the means of production because I see the most workable forms of socialism as indistinguishable from liberal capitalism in effect, and believe the true way to emancipate the working class is to just give them enough resources to say no. In a sense, my own solutions are more moderate as I advocate working within capitalism to reform and fix it, rather than overthrow it (which has never worked). I also focus on liberating workers from the most coercive elements of the system, giving them more liberty within capitalism, whereas marxists still believed that property should be entirely linked to work, which creates tons of problems I have outlined in previous articles in the past.
But yeah. That's the short version. Now no one can say this stuff is too hard to understand or that you need to be hyper educated to understand it.
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