Example of philosophical critique

I. Title
Karl Marx’s Concept of Classless Society is Unattainable and Impractical

II. Introduction
We are living in a society where there are rich, not so rich, and poor people or we can say that we have the class in the society called the upper class, the middle class and the lower class. In reality we have this stratum. Many of us believe that those rich people become richer and those poor people continuously become poorer. It is one of the reason why the concept of Karl Marx about the classless society is ideal wherein there will be no classes and people will all be equal in the society.
The concept of classless society has been elaborated by Karl Marx, the father of Marxist philosophy which is the basis of the communist ideology. Classless society refers to a society in which no one is born into a social class. It is a society without the antagonistic classes or strata. It means a society in which the classes with opposing interests such as the land owners and the landless, workers and management, freemen and slaves, the rich and the poor, exploiter and the exploited, capitalists and laborers are not found.
In a classless society there should be an attempt to abolish all classes. Classes should not exist. Society must be conducted in such a way that the higher class or the evils of classes are liquidated. Privileges should be enjoyed by everyone. Society must aim at social justice where all will enjoy the equality of opportunity.
Karl Marx idea was indeed a good one. His idea about the classless society is being talked of in the past even in the present. It is an ideal society where there will be no class or strata and all the status of people are equal. But can we really speak of a classless society?

III. Thesis
Karl Marx has been regarded as the champion of communism and an advocate of “classless society.” Marxism is often known as a “philosophy of social revolution.” Marx never aspired for a revolution just for the sake of a revolution. He wanted to establish an egalitarian society know for quality and social coherence. He intended to see a “classless society” free from all types of exploitations.
Classless society means a society without the antagonistic classes or strata. It means society in which classes with opposing interest such as the land owners and the landless, workers and management, freemen and slaves, the rich and the poor, exploiters and the exploited capitalist and laborers are not found. Such type of society never existed in the past
Marx was sufficiently aware of the existence of classes. In Communist Manifesto he said that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle” makes it evident that he knew that classes exist even in the beginning of history. In spite of the awareness of the existing class, Marx was having a dream in his mind. Since this society is hard to achieve, a revolution must happen between the rich and poor people or the capitalist against the workers. It cannot be attained in a peaceful way because those rich people will not give the control over the poor and the will not give up their wealth. He believes that class struggle would help the establishment of classless society.
There are some circumstances that favor the existence of classless society. As Marx stated, when the human society reaches the capitalist or the bourgeoisie and the working class or the proletariats, their interests’ always in clash and conflict arises. This conflict will be the reason for the social movements and revolutions. Marx believe that when the dictatorship of the proletariat happen it will lead to the transformation of society and this will culminates in the establishment of the classless society wherein no people are richer than the others. There will be no classes and all will be equal. There will be no leaders or powerful over others, but all will have the equal opportunity and privileges. Marx’s ideas bear great pertinence to contemporary times because inequality among the various economic classes is one of the most prominent political issues in this and other societies. We do today, for better or worse classify people according to wealth and abundance. Material wealth is an insatiable aim of each individual and this is precisely the reason that Marx’s vision of a classless society will never be realized. Equilibrium will never be achieved because human nature compels us to always search for greater wealth and to achieve a greater level of superiority over our fellow men. Humans are naturally capitalist and should be free to pursue their aspirations in a free and competitive atmosphere.
Now if we get rid of classes and we became a classless society and we were all the same it means that the workers will be paid the same amount of money. All workers no matter what job will have the same equal amount of payment. It will be unfair to those person who are more qualified, has more expertise, doing harder job to get paid equally with those person who’s doing less qualified job and easier job. So it means that classless society are in favor of those person who are unfortunate in life or those people who cannot have the chance to have good status but how about those persons who study hard, work hard just to improve their status in life? Classless society will block the motivation of people within the society since we will all have the same class distinctions. We study in order to have a better future and to have a qualified job, we work hard for us to have money and to improve our status in life. Society is built with motivation and incentives to get higher pay, to work their way up. So if we will have the same class together there will be no motivation for us to work hard and to work our way up.

IV. Antithesis
In most countries there are class divisions. These classes are based on many factors like religion, wealth, caste and color even habits have created classes. To have a classless society is a modem idea. Marxian theory of classless society is regarded as weakest link in his thought. This faith made him project his own concept of an ideal society.
Marxist-communists call for the establishment of a classless society where there the class structures are removed. This idea was impossible because no matter how we look at it, it is impossible to remove the class structure that we have within the society. Society has generally always has class structures within it. There are always been three distinctive classes, this are the upper class, middle class and lower class basically, the rich, the not-so-rich and the poor. Those communist and Marxist wants to get rid of this class structures for us to be in all same class together and that is impossible and it cannot happen from a hold number of standpoints. Class structures will always remain within the society but the key to dealing with class structures is not by removing them but making sure that there is no discrimination based on the class structures. It is by making sure that people from the lower class will not be discriminated by the upper class. They should have the same legal rights or the government who has the power should give the people what they need for them not to feel the unfairness on being in the lower class.
V. Synthesis So the concept of a classless society was to eliminate the classes or strata within the society. It aims to have a sense of equality wherein no people are richer than the others. In this ideal society there would be no discrimination and the rich class will no longer rule the society hence all the people will have the same standing within the society. They will have the same amount of privileges and opportunities. What you have is what everybody has. Since everyone is equal there will be no private ownership of property and all will belong to the people and the society they will have is communism. But then most countries are not under the communism wherein there are no strata because people have their own ideology. People have their own idea, since from the very beginning we have the class structures and class distinction will always remain in people’s mind.

VI. Conclusion/Recommendation
The topic Karl Marx’s concept of classless society is impossible and impractical states that the classless society was not achieved by the Marxists even after more than years of Marx’s death because it is nowhere to be seen in the society. Upon reviewing and gathering information that is related, the researchers proved that Marx’s advocacy about eliminating the classes strata didn’t come true since it is always on person’s mentality that there is always a superior and an inferior to them. It is right that everything should be fair and the class should be removed, but isn’t it everyone’s goal to be part of the higher class or the so called superior? In our society there are always people you look up and look down to and we all know crab mentality is a natural quality and a way of behavior that most people have due to survival. Therefore classless society is impossible to attain also, if classless society is achieved, people will not strive to be better because they will not see any reason to be competent anymore and the society will lose its balance.
Everyone will lose their sense of life and people will just simply exist and they will have no goals at all. If everything will be fair among the three classes; the upper class, the middle class, the lower class how about those people who are much more educated and suitable for higher jobs? What will be the purpose of education if everyone’s wages will be the same? Isn’t that unfair? It is okay if everything is not fair because not everyone is capable to reach a higher degree of education and not everyone have the same level of knowledge. As long as there will be no slavery and no one will violate the rights of the lower class in the society. We can always determine the society classes’ benefits because it helps achieve a balance community. This is the ideal way for people to live where everyone should work for their good and accomplish their goals with their own. It also improves people’s perseverance and initiative, considering they will become diligent. We all know these kinds of people helps the society evolves into a more progressive one.

VII. References http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/classlesssociety http://www.infobarrel.com/karlmarxsconceptofclasslesssociety (S.A Sheppard) http://www.shareyouressays.com/87093/essay-on-marxian-concept-of-classless-society (Neha Panshare) http://libcom.org/library/chapter-3-classless-society (Juan Conatz) http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/politics-policy-people/sociology/can-there-ever-be-classless-society (Jonathan Ree) http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/classlesssociety http://www.egs.edu/library/karl-marx/biography/ http://redoedo.blogspot.com/2008/12classless-society-aimof-marx.html (Redoedo)

VIII. Philosopher’s Background
Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was born on May 5, 1818 in the city of Trier, Germany. His father was a lawyer who came from a long line of Rabbis, but had changed his faith to Protestantism in order to keep his job. Karl Marx went to the University of Bonn to study law when he was 17 years old. Here he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, whose father, Baron von Westphalen, influenced Marx to read Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. Only a year later, Marx was moved by his father to the University of Berlin where he studied Hegelianism, influenced by Ludwig Feurbach and other Hegelians. He admired G.W.F. Hegel's dialectics and belief in historical inevitability, but Marx questioned the idealism and abstract thought of philosophy and maintained his belief that reality lies in the material base of economics. In distinct contrast to G.W.F. Hegel's concentration on the state in his philosophy of law, Marx saw civil society as the sphere to be studied in order to understand the historical development of humankind. In 1841 Marx earned his doctorate at Jena with his work on the materialism and atheism of Greek atomists.

It was difficult for Marx to find publishers because of his radical political views, so he moved to Cologne, which was known to house a strong liberal opposition movement. The liberal group the Cologne Circle published a paper by Marx defending the freedom of the press in their newspaper The Rhenish Gazette (in 1842 he was made the editor of the paper). In Cologne Marx met Moses Hess, a radical who organized socialist meetings, which Marx attended. At these meetings Marx learned of the struggles of the German working-class. Based on the information he gathered from the members present at the meetings, Marx wrote an article on the poverty of the Mosel wine-farmers in which he was highly critical of the government. When the article was published in 1843, the Prussian authorities banned The Rhenish Gazette and threatened Marx with his arrest. Marx married his fiancé and they fled together to Paris. Here he took a position as editor of a political journal called Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (Franco-German Annals) that was designed to connect French socialism and radical Hegelianism. Although the journal only lived as long as one issue, it was a valuable opportunity for Marx. Through it he met his life-long friend Friedrich Engels, a contributor to the journal. Other prominent contributors included his old mentor from Berlin, Bruno Bauer, and the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin.
While in Paris, Marx became a communist, and worked primarily on studying political economy and the history of the French Revolution. He wrote a series of papers known as ÷konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844), however they were not published until the 1930s. The Manuscripts are influenced by Feuerbach and outline a humanist idea of communism. Marx contrasts capitalist society, and an alienated nature of labor, with communist society, in which human beings in cooperative production develop their nature freely. In 1844 Marx reviewed Bruno Bauer's book On the Jewish Question. More than a review, Marx used the article to critique the continued influence of religion over politics, and propose a revolutionary change to the structure of European society.

In 1845 Marx was expelled from France by Guizot. He fled with Friedrich Engelsto Brussels where they stayed for three years with intermittent trips to England to visit Engels' family who had cotton-spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx wrote a piece against the idealistic socialism of P.J. Proudhon called The Poverty of Philosophy. He also worked on his materialist conception of history, and developed the manuscript that would come to be named The German Ideology when it was published after his death. This paper argues that the nature of an individual is dependent upon the material conditions that determine his production. It is a historical study of modes of production through the ages, and in it Marx predicts the collapse of industrial capitalism and the advancement of communism. Marx joined the Communist League at this time, which was an organization of German émigré workers centered in London. Marx and Engels became the major theoretical force of the League, and at a conference in 1847 they were commissioned to write a declaration of the League's position. The hope was that the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (The Communist Manifesto) would inspire social revolution, and no sooner was it published than the 1848 revolutions broke out across Europe. This work marks a turn in Marx's writing from appealing to natural rights as justification for social reform, to indicating that the laws of history would inevitably lead to the power of the working class. The Manifesto distinguishes communism from other movements, proposes specific social reforms, and includes a description of the struggles between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It also explicitly encourages workers to unite in revolution against the existing regimes.
The panic caused by the February revolution of 1848 caused the Belgian government to expel Marx from Brussels. He was invited by the French provisional government to return to Paris. From there, he returned to Cologne with some friends to start the newspaper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The government there attempted to shut down the paper through legal means and finally succeeded by finding pretexts to expel the editors. Marx and his friends were expelled after the revolts of May 1849, and the newspaper's last edition was June 1849. Marx had to return to Paris, but he was expelled again immediately, and moved on to London, which would be his final home.

In London Marx rejoined with the Communist League, confident that there would be further revolutionary action in Europe. He proceeded to write two pamphlets about the 1848 revolution in France and its effects, titled, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He felt that new revolution would only be possible if there was to be a new crisis, and he hoped to uncover what would cause this crisis. He spent a large amount of his time in the British Museum studying political economy toward this end. For the first part of the 1850s Marx, Jenny, and their four children lived in an impoverished state in a three room flat in London's Soho. The couple would have two more children, but only three in all would survive. The family survived primarily on gifts from Friedrich Engels whose own income came from the family business in Manchester. Marx also earned a small amount from articles he wrote as the foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. In 1864 Marx and Friedrich Engels together founded the International Workingmen's Association, which would finally break up due to disagreements between Marx and the anarchist Mikhail Babuknin.

By 1857 Marx had written an 800-page manuscript which was to become Das Kapital (Capital). This is his major work on political economy, capital, landed property, the state, wage labor, foreign trade and the world market. In the early part of the 1860s he took a break from his work on Das Kapital to work on Theories of Surplus Value, a three-volume work. This text discusses specific theories of political economy, primarily those of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In 1867 Marx published volume I of Das Kapital, an analysis of the capitalist process of production, with an elaboration on his version of labor theory value, surplus value, and exploitation, that he predicted would lead to a falling profit rate and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Marx continued to work on Volumes II and III of Das Kapital for the rest of his life, even though they were essentially finished in the late 1860s. Friedrich Engels would publish the last two volumes after Marx's death. By 1871 Marx's daughter Eleanor, who was 17 at the time, was helping her father with his work. She had been taught at home by Marx himself, and grew up with a rich understanding of the capitalist system which would allow her to play an important part in the future of the British labor movement.

Marx's health rapidly declined during the last ten years of his life and he was unable to work at the same impressive pace he had set in his early years. He still paid close attention to contemporary politics, especially concerning Germany and Russia, and he often offered his comments. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme he critiqued the actions of his admirers Karl Liebknecht and August Bebel, disagreeing with their compromises with state socialism in the interest of a united socialist party. He indicated in his letters to Vera Zasulich of this time that he imagined it could be possible for Russia to bypass a capitalist stage of development and move directly to communism by basing its economy on common ownership of land characterized by the village. In 1881 both Marx and his wife became ill. Marx had a swollen liver, and survived, but Jenny died on December 2, 1881. In January 1883 Marx was deeply saddened by the loss of his eldest daughter to cancer of the bladder. On March 14, 1883 Marx was found having passed away in his armchair. He is buried at Highgate Cemetery in London.