Basic Marxism--One

Marxism may not be easy to grasp, but it's not as hard to grasp as we marxists usually make it. I like to think that many people grasp in practice what we miss in theory: all around us people are acting in the spirit of marxism without having studied much. And many people might be surprised to learn that they are indeed marxists after a fashion.

A marxist political party or organization has as some of its tasks gathering in the folks who are already acting in line with marxist principles and constantly educating ourselves and developing our world outlook. New educational methods and a struggle against elitism takes this out of the hands of a few and makes it possible for people to learn marxism in groups, each person teaching the other. You can also go to David Harvey's great website and learn Marx's Capital with modest effort. The resources and means to learn all of marxism are there if you want to use them.

I'm going to do a series of quotes from Marx, Engels, Lenin and others which will introduce readers to some aspects of basic marxism. If readers have other quotes that they find helpful--send them in!

Let's start with one from Marx and Engels:

There is no need of any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of the environment of man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism in connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all of his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in it man experiences and gets used to what is really human and that he becomes aware of himself as a man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man's private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the materialised sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social source of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of separate individuals but by the power of society.