Karl Marx's Impact On Civil Society

Georg Hegel was one of the philosophers who dedicated his work to exemplifying the importance of the individual in society, his or her thoughts, actions, desires, and aspirations. According to Hegel, through human interaction and undeniable needs for survival, a society, by human action, interaction, and initiation, was formed. “In the course of the actual attainment of selfish ends – an attainment conditioned in this way by universality – there is formed a system of complete interdependence…” which can, in all hopefulness, transcend into a society of peace. Civil society for Hegel is ruled by constant arguments and stand-offs. However, through these arguments, through forming a thesis, which will be questioned by an antithesis, there

For Marx, those who have power often manipulate the state, and those who do not are being left behind. Civil society is also greatly affected by individuals who are often rich or well-to-do, i.e. the bourgeoisie. Also, those in power are extensively limiting the freedom of those proletariats who are not capable of reaching the heights of the social ladder. As such, Marx provides a radical idea of a revolution of the masses, the proletarians, to overthrow bourgeoisie rule and create a sense of equality among the community, the inversion of the triangle, in the colloquial language. He believed that modernity would solve social problems and make people content. However, modernity for him was socialism and communism, not capitalism. Although Marx had as much more acute understanding of human alienation than other modernists, he did not doubt that the end of capitalism, which he characterized as a stage of prehistory, would solve people’s problems—he believed stemmed from the alienation of their labor power under capitalism. In this sense, then, postmodern critics, even if they oppose capitalism, as most of them do, reduce the utopian ambitions of Marx. With a variety of existentialists and phenomenologist (all influenced by Nietzsche), postmodernists have a negative characteristic wherein they believe that life

According to Abulad, “postmodernism does not merely chronologically follow modernism, it reacts against modernism.” He argued that postmodernism is not an ideology or a school of thought one may or may not adopt. Rather, postmodernism is a consciousness, a way of thinking, a mode of life and thought which may be conscious or unconscious, a perspective that defines one’s attitude towards reality and