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Marxism
Worldview category:
atheism
Description -
Isn't Marxism Dead -
Well Known Adherents -
Major Works -
Key Terms -
Primary Beliefs
"The
Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive
and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook
irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of
bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that
man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German
philosophy, English political economy and French socialism."V.I. Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,
1913.
Description
"The
political and economic philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in
which the concept of class struggle plays a central role in
understanding society's allegedly inevitable development from bourgeois
oppression under capitalism to a socialist and ultimately classless
society."(Source: The American Heritage Dictionary)
Isn't Marxism Dead?
"But
Marxism is so entrenched in [college] courses ranging from literature to
anthropology, and addressing topics on everything from class systems of
Victorian England to the alienation expressed by the hip-hop
culture…that today’s students are virtually bathed in Marx’s ideas"(Source: "Where Marxism Lives Today", U.S. News & World Report,
September 2, 2003, quoting Joseph Childers, English professor at
University of California Riverside).
Well Known Adherents
Karl Marx (1818 - 1883)
Friederick Engels (1820 – 1895)
V.I. Lenin (1870 – 1924)
Major Works
The Communist Manifesto, by
Karl Marx and Friederick Engels, 1848
"The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."(the
opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto)
Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Harvard University Press, 2000.
Key Terms
Bourgeois – the owners of property and the means of production;
the class of people that oppresses the proletariat.
Communism - An ideology that
seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on
common ownership of the means of production. It is usually considered a
branch of the broader socialist movement that draws on the various
political and intellectual movements that trace their origins back to
the work of Karl Marx. (from Wikipedia, date: 2008)
Leninism – The form of Communism espoused by
Vladimir Lenin and implemented by Lenin in the
Soviet Union.
Liberation theology -
A school of theology that focuses on Jesus Christ as not
only the Redeemer, but also the Liberator of the oppressed. It
emphasizes the Christian mission to bring justice to the poor and
oppressed, particularly through political activism. At its inception,
liberation theology was predominantly found in the Catholic Church after
the Second Vatican Council. It is often cited as a form of Christian
socialism, and it has enjoyed widespread influence in Latin America and
among the Jesuits, although its influence diminished within Catholicism
after the Vatican issued official rejections of the theology in the
1980s and liberation theologians were harshly admonished by Pope John
Paul II (leading to the curtailing of its growth). (from Wikipedia,
date: )
Proletariat – the working class
Socialism – 1. Any of various
theories or systems of social organization in which the means of
producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a
centralized government that often plans and controls the economy. 2.
The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and
communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the
dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved. (Source: The American Heritage Dictionary)
Primary Beliefs
View of God: Atheistic (God does not exist).
"…we have once and for all declared war on religion
and religious ideas and care little whether we are called atheists or
anything else."Friederick Engels, Collected Works, 3:463
"Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a
sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of
capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less
worthy of man."V.I. Lenin in Lenin Collected Works,
Progress Publishers, 1965, Moscow, Volume 10, p. 83.
View of reality: Matter is all that
exists. Marxism denies the existence of the supernatural.
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