Marx, Karl (1818-83) German social thinker and founder of international communism who held a dim view of religion, a point that upsets many religious people. Nevertheless, one could say that his ideas were well-intentioned and humane. Marx advocated equal wages for equal work. He decried the exploitation of workers by the owners of the means of commodity production. His labor theory of value maintains that products contain a use value, an exchange value and a surplus value. Use value is the practical utility of a commodity or service. Exchange value is its value as compared to other goods and services. Marx expresses this as a ratio: A chocolate bar at $1.00 would have an exchange value of 1:2 with a hamburger costing $2.00. The surplus value is the amount over and above both the exchange and use values which the owners of the means of production procure for themselves (i.e. corporate profit). The communism we see today has little to do with Marx’s original vision. Marx believed that human history went through an inevitable sequence of socioeconomic types: (1) Primitive Communism (2) Feudalism (3) Capitalism and (4) Communism. For Marx Capitalism inevitably passes into Communism. But this apparently ‘universal law‘ has clearly been refuted by China, which developed in the reverse. The People’s Republic turned to Capitalism after a long spell of Communism. And in that regard China is fast becoming an economic leader, loosening rigid local laws and opening wide the door to international markets. As for religion, Marx says it is the “opiate of the people” in which false otherworldly beliefs sway public attention away from the real issues of social, political and economic oppression. Marx was extremely popular in universities from the 1960’s to early 80’s but has been supplanted by the likes of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, these thinkers representing the somewhat voguish development called postmodernism. One could argue that some of the intricate, esoteric arguments of postmodernism, couched in a special, elitist language represented for a time a new scholastic ‘theology’ for the late 20th century-a theology not unlike that of the medieval schoolmen but with God and God’s powers either removed altogether or obscured by ambiguous language. Today, however, postmodernism is being applied to theologies that include God in the picture, as we find with ‘postmodern theology.’ » Advertising, Ancestor Cults, Chomsky (Noam), Class, Creed, Dialectical Materialism, Durkheim (Emile), False Consciousness, Forces of Production, Fromm (Erich), Ideology, Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich), Marxism, Relations of Production, Religion, Ricardo (David), Weber (Max)
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