Opinion on Marxism and Critical Theory
The original reason for choosing this topic for the final presentation is because of how controversial yet relevant it remains even today, finding new and new implementations in life around the world. So now I want to express my opinion on the chosen topic.
In recent years we can see the new rise of communist ideas in the Western world and in such a situation I find it interesting to question why it could be happening. Despite all the previous examples and experiences of other countries, the youth in Western Europe and the U.S. has a significant interest in communism. No need to mention, we all know that this kind of regime has proven itself to not work well on country-size scales, usually leading to authoritarian rule. And for the reasons of its popularity, we can most often think about unsatisfied people’s needs leading to revolutionary scenarios, the way it always happened before.
In general, I feel quite skeptical about Marxist/communist ideas as a form of extremist ideology that sacrifices individual rights for the sake of utilitarian ‘higher’ needs of the state — and, as we can see from the past, not even being able to provide people with basic needs well enough. Instead of making everyone ‘equally rich’, it only makes everyone equally poor. Ironic, how positioning itself as ‘pro-people’ (assuming that an average normal person is an exploited worker, which is quite true), in the end, doesn’t solve the poverty issues in most cases but keeps exploitation for a new holy reason of building mythical better tomorrow that never happened. As well as taking away the profits from the ‘rich’ making it quite demoralizing and demotivating to even try harder and reach something more in your career or business (unless you also believe in the bright idea of communism) — because it would be all taken away. This all gives a feeling of communism as somewhat rather a religion than an actual state governing type. If compare to Christianity (even though I’m not a Christian), you can see similar traits: Jesus / The Great Leader, Antichrist / Bourgeoisie, Kingdom of Heaven / Communism, and so on. But the crucial difference between the ideas is that in Christianity the key is love and acceptance, and in communism, you just kill the rich and redistribute their money. Especially ironic is to see many adult Russians having nostalgic feelings about the USSR and the communist ideology, yet wishing to go back to the monarchist times (and being religious at the same time).
But what does give something more similar to the idea of love and acceptance — is critical theory. Developed as a reflection of Marxist ideas, the critical theory doesn’t focus that much on materialism, goods, and money, but offers a more philosophical approach to rethink our perception of society and culture, and possibly transform it, adapt for a more peaceful living, and to build a more efficient and well-being society. I can relate more to the main idea of critical theory (or at least to how I see its message)— the dialectic approach, rather than Marxism. This idea thinks about social values as something solely objective by itself, offers to try to take a look at life from other people’s perspective and try to analyze and understand it. Created at a time when social science was very conservative in its ideas, the new look offered a critical view on it: hey, maybe Marx was right and there is the social struggle of peasants, but maybe it’s not the best way to make a bloody mess with total governmental control to redistribute the goods. The critical theory assumes that we as a society can try to educate people better, as well as try to adopt more altruist/socialist values to make people more willing to cooperate and share, invest, and donate — to result in mutual benefit and social development for everyone.
The theory’s developers realized that it is not a simple or easy process, of course, and defined 3 stages leading to this better future:
The first (‘thesis’), is the rule of the major hegemonic idea/concept/culture/anything with ignorance of alternatives and oppression of the opposition. The second (‘antithesis’), is the switched rule of the oppressed — something that used to be underground and marginal now becomes the new trend and a hegemon. And the third one (‘synthesis’) — is the balance between them, when those cultures learn to cooperate and compromise, giving birth to a new vision and a new order.
This theory sounds positive and more appealing to me since it doesn’t offer a harm's way of solving problems ad raising only more conflict and aggression, but provides an opportunity to build something new peacefully — through communication, education, and cooperation, leaving space for hope and making happiness more believable (at least in theory).
