Karl Marx





Karl Marx (May 5, 1818 - March 14, 1883) was an influential political
philosopher and social theorist. Although Marx addressed many issues in his
career as a journalist and philosopher, he is most famous for his analysis
of history in terms of class conflict, summed up in his assertion that, "The
interests of capitalists and wage-laborers are diametrically opposed to each other."

Early Life

Marx was born into a progressive Jewish family in Trier, Germany. His father
Herschel was a lawyer. As advancement opportunities for Jews were rather
limited in early 19th century Prussia and they were not extremely religious,
Herschel decided to change his name to Heinrich and convert the family to
the Prussian state religion of Lutheranism, after which his legal career
prospered. The Marx family was very liberal and the Marx household hosted
many visiting intellectuals and artists through Karl's early life.

Education

Marx received outstanding marks in gymnasium, the approximate equivalent of
high school. His senior thesis (which anticipated his later development of a
social analysis of religion, although in a way that emphasized social
functions rather than economic and political inequality) was a treatise on
"Religion: The Glue That Binds Society Together", for which he won a prize.

Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1833 to study law, at his
father's behest. Bonn was a notorious party school, and Marx did poorly as
he spent most of his time singing songs in beer halls. The next year, his
father made him transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented
University of Berlin. There, his interests turned to philosophy, much to his
father's dismay, and he joined the circle of students and young professors
known as the "Young Hegelians", led by Bruno Bauer. Some members of this
circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and
post-Hegelian philosophy.

Georg Hegel had just recently died in 1831, and during his lifetime was an
extremely influential figure at the University and in German academia in
general. The Hegelian establishment (known as the Right Hegelians) in place
at the University maintained that the series of historical dialectics had
been completed, and that Prussian society as it existed was the culmination
of all social development to date, with an extensive civil service system,
good universities, industrialization, and high employment. The Young
Hegelians with whom Marx was associated believed that there were still
further dialectical changes to come, and that the Prussian society of the
time was far from perfect as it still contained pockets of poverty,
government censorship was in place, and non-Lutherans suffered from
religious discrimination.

Marx was warned not to submit his doctoral dissertation at the University of
Berlin, as it would certainly be poorly received there due to his reputation
as a Young Hegelian radical. Marx instead submitted his dissertation, which
compared the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus, to the University
of Jena in 1840, where it was accepted.

Career

When his mentor Bauer was dismissed from the philosophy faculty in 1842,
Marx abandoned philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the Rheinische
Zeitung, a radical German newspaper. After the newspaper was later shut in
1843, in part due to Marx's conflicts with government censors, Marx returned
to philosophy, turned to political activism, and worked as a free-lance journalist.

Marx first moved to France, where he re-evaluated his relationship with
Bauer and the Young Hegelians, and wrote "On the Jewish Question," mostly a
critique of current notions of civil-rights and political emancipation. It
was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long collaborator
Friedrich Engels, who called Marx's attention to the situation of the
working class, and guided Marx's interest in economics. After he was forced
to leave Paris for his writings, he and Engels moved to Brussels.

There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a critique of the philosophy of
Hegel and the Young Hegelians, and then Marx wrote The Poverty of
Philosophy, a critique of French socialist thought. These works lay the
foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto,
first published on February 21, 1848, which was commissioned by the
Communist League (formerly, the League of the Just), an organization of
German emigrˇs whom Marx had met in London.

That year Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval; a working-class
movement seized power from king Louis Philippe in France and invited Marx to
return to Paris. When this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved to
London. In 1852 Marx wrote his famous pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte, in which he analyzed Napoleon III's take over of France. In
1864 Marx organized the International Workingmen's Association, later called
the First International, as a base for continued political activism. This
organization collapsed in 1872 in part because of the fall of the Paris
Commune, and in part because many members turned to Mikhail Bakunin's
anarchism. In London Marx also dedicated himself to historical and
theoretical works, the most famous of which is the multivolume Das Kapital
(Capital: A Critique of Political Economy), the first volume of which was
published in 1867.

Marx died in London in the year 1883, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London.

Influences on Marx's Philosophy

In general, Marx's thought has been influenced by two often contradictory
elements: determinism and activism. On the one hand, Marx believed that he
could study history and society scientifically, and derive laws that explain
and predict the course of history and the outcome of social conflicts. Some
followers of Marx conclude that a communist revolution is inevitable. On the
other hand, Marx famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways; the point is to change it," and dedicated
himself to trying to change the world. Consequently, some followers of Marx
conclude that dedicated revolutionaries must organize social change.

Marx's theory, which he called "historical materialism" and which Engels
called "scientific socialism" or "dialectical materialism", is based on
Hegel's claim that history occurs through a dialectic, or clash, of opposing
forces. Hegel was a philosophical idealist who believed that we live in a
world of appearances, and true reality is an ideal. Marx accepted this
notion of the dialectic, but rejected Hegel's idealism. In this he was
influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach
argued that God is really a creation of man, and that the qualities people
attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued
that it is the material world that is real, and that our ideas of it are
consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other
philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did
not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the
ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific
ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their
lives clearly.

The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was
Engels's book, The Condition of the English Working Class, which led Marx to
conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict, and to see
the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution.

Marx's Philosophy

The notion of labor is fundamental in Marx's thought. Basically, Marx argued
that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of
transformation "labor" and the capacity to transform nature labor power. For
Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is
intimately tied to the human mind and human imagination:

     A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee
     puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But
     what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this,
     that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects
     it in reality.

Beyond his claim about the human capacity to transform nature, Marx makes no
other claims about "human nature."

Although "labor power" for Marx is human nature, he did not believe that all
people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and
individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity, and that the
conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially
determined and change over time.

Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means of
production, literally those things, like land and natural resources, labor,
and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and
the social relations of production, in other words, the social relationships
people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together
these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given
society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had
progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of
production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change
more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new
technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to
regulate that technology). For Marx this lag is a major source of conflict.

Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only
relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or
classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes
purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously
identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of
objective criteria, such as their access to resources.

Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most
fundamental resource of all, their own labor-power. Marx wrote extensively
about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic,
Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more
materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up
ownership of one's own labor -- one's capacity to transform the world -- is
tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss.
Marx described this loss in tems of commodity fetishism, in which people
come to believe that it is the very things that they produce that are
powerful, and the sources of power and creativity, rather than people
themselves. He argued that when this happens, people begin to mediate all
their relationships among themselves and with others through commodities.

Commodity fetishism is an example of what Marx and Engels called false
consciousness, which is closely related to their understanding of ideology.
By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular
class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal
and eternal. Marx and Engels point was not only that such beliefs are wrong;
they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control
that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the
production of food or manufactured goods, it includes the production of
ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a
subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus,
while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth
about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things
people produce are actually more productive than the people who produced
them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to Marx and
Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own
labor-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's
understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the Contribution to
the Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right:"

     Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of
     real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the
     sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the
     soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Marx's Critique of Capitalism

Marx argued that this alienation of labor power (and resulting commodity
fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to
capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought
and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production
developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity -- when peasants
became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to sell their own
labor because they no longer possessed their own land or tools necessary to
produce. A person sells his/her labor-power when he/she accepts compensation
in return for whatever work he/she does in a given period of time (in other
words, he/she is not selling the product of their labor, but his/her
capacity to work). In return for selling his/her labor power he/she receive
money which allows them to survive. The person who must sell his/her labor
power to live is a "proletarian." The person who buys the labor power,
generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a
"capitalist" or "bourgeois." (NOTE: Marx considered this an objective
description of capitalism, distinct from any one of a variety of ideological
claims of or about capitalism).

Marx distinguished capitalists from merchants. Merchants buy goods in one
place and sell them in another; more precisely, they buy things in one
market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate
within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a
commodity in one market and another. Merchants hope to capture the
difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the
other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and
the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx
observed that in practically every successful industry the price for labor
was lower than the price of the manufactured good. Marx called this
difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value was in fact
the source of a capitalist's profit.

The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because
the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new
technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most
revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of
production. But Marx believed that capitalism was prone to periodic crises.
He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new
technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus
value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that
the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of
profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recesion or
depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx
understood that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and
eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth
of new sectors of the economy.

Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be
punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the
long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the empowerment of the
capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. Finally, he
believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they
would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a
system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises.

Marx's Influence

The body of work of Marx and of Marx and Engels covers a wide range of
topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of
class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to
propose a political and economic philosophy dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless,
there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's
writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions (and
it is important to distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx believed;"
for example, shortly before he died in 1880, Marx wrote a letter to the
French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue,
accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of denying the value
of reformist struggles; "if that is Marxism" -- paraphrasing what Marx wrote
-- "then I am not a Marxist"). Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to
describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. mode of
production, class, commodity fetishism) to understand capitalist and other
societies, or to describe those who believe that a worker's revolution is
the only means to a communist society.

Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second
International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization
collapsed in 1914, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's
"evolutionary" socialism, and in part because of divisions precipitated by
World War I.

World War I also led to the Russian Revolution and the consequent ascendence
of Vladimir Lenin's leadership of the communist movement, embodied in the
"Third International". Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and
political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called Leninism
or Bolshevism, which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally
organized Communist Party.

After Lenin's death, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, seized control of the Party and state
apparatus. He argued that before a world-wide communist revolution would be
possible, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to dedicate itself to
building socialism in their own country.

At this time, Leon Trotsky left the Soviet Union and in 1934 founded the
competing "Fourth International." Some followers of Trotsky argued that
Stalin had created a bureaucratic state rather than a socialist state.

In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that
peasants and not just workers could play a leading role in a communist
revolution.

In the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident Marxists at the Frankfurt School
in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, espoused Critical
Theory (unrelated to Critical philosophy), which offered a non- Bolshevist
critique of contemporary capitalism. Other influential non-Bolshevik
Marxists at that time include Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and Rosa
Luxemburg.

In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded The Monthly Review, a journal
and press, to provide a outlet for Marxist thought in the United States
independent of the Communist Party.

Contemporary Criticisms

Marxian theory has been criticized from numerous points of view. Many
proponents of capitalism have argued that capitalism in fact is ultimately a
more effective means of generating and redistributing wealth than socialism
or communism, and that the gulf between rich and poor that concerned Marx
and Engels was a temporary phenomenon. Some suggest that greed and the need
to acquire material wealth is an inherent component of human behavior, and
is not caused by the adoption of capitalism or any other specific economic
system (although economic anthropologists have questioned this assertion),
and that different economic systems reflect different social responses to
this fact. Economists generally reject his use of the "labor theory of
value," although such critics generally overlook Marx's distinction between
value and price.

Marx has also been criticized from the left. Evolutionary Socialists reject
his claim that socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and
violent revolution. Others argue that class is not the most fundamental
inequality in history, and call attention to patriarchy or race. Some today
question the theoretical and historical validity of "class" as an analytic
construct or as a political actor. In this line, some question Marx's
reliance on 19th century notions that linked science with the idea of
"progress" (see social evolution). Many observe that capitalism has changed
much since Marx's time, and that class diffferences and relationships are
much more complex -- citing as one example the fact that much corporate
stock in the United States is owned by workers through pension funds. (see
post-structuralism and postmodernism for discussions of two movements
generally aligned with the left that are critical of Marx and Marxism.)

Outside of Europe and the United States, communism has generally been
superseded by anti-colonialist and nationalist struggles (although they
sometimes appeal to Marx for theoretical support).

Contemporary supporters of Marx argue most generally that Marx was correct
that human behavior reflects determinate historical and social conditions
(and is therefore changing and cannot be understood in terms of some
universal "human nature"). More specifically, they argue his analysis of
commodities is still useful and that alienation is still a problem. Some
argue that capitalism does not exist as an independent system in any one
country, and that one must analyze it as a global system. They further argue
that when examined as a global system, capitalism is still organizing and
exacerbating the gulf between rich and poor that first caught Marx's
attention when he read Engels' book on England.