Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 ± March 14, 1883) was

a German[2] philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist,

andcommunist revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development

of modern communism and socialism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of

chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: "The history of all hitherto

existing society is the history ofclass struggles." Marx argued that capitalism, like

previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions which

would lead to its destruction.[3] Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he

believed socialism would, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to

a stateless, classless society called pure communism. This would emerge after a

transitional period called the "dictatorship of the proletariat": a period sometimes

referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy".[4][5] In section one of The

Communist Manifesto Marx describes feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social

contradictions play in the historical process:

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation

the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the

development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which

feudal society produced and exchanged ... the feudal relations of property became no

longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many

fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped

free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and

the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on
before our own eyes ... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend

to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they

have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon

as they overcome these fetters, they bring order into the whole of bourgeois society,

endanger the existence of bourgeois property.[6]

Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socio-economic change. He argued that

the structural contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way to

socialism. "The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the

very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What

the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and

the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."[6]

On the other hand, Marx argued that socio-economic change occurred through

organized revolutionary action. He argued that capitalism will end through the organized

actions of an international working class: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs

which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call

communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The

conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."[7]

While Marx remained a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas and the

ideology of Marxism began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly

after his death. This influence gained added impetus with the victory of the Bolsheviks in

the Russian October Revolution in 1917, and few parts of the world remained

significantly untouched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. Marx is

typically cited, with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal
architects of modern social science.[8] In 1999, a BBC poll revealed that Marx had been

voted the "thinker of the millennium" by people from around the world.

BIOGRAPHY

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Trier, in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower

Rhine. His father, Heinrich Marx, was born Jewish and converted to Lutheranism prior

to Karl's birth, in part to advance his career as a lawyer; Karl's grandfather was

the rabbi of Trier. A man of the Enlightenment, Heinrich was devoted

to Kant and Voltaire, who took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. Karl's

mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was from the Netherlands, and Jewish at the time of

Karl's birth, although she converted upon the death of her parents. Karl was baptized

when he was six years old.[10] Little is known about Marx's childhood.[11]

Marx in 1882
Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a Prussian baron, on June

19, 1843, in the Pauluskirche, at Bad Kreuznach. Marx and Jenny had seven children,

but due to poverty, only three survived to adulthood.[12] Marx's major source of income

was from the support of Friedrich Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing

income from his family's business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly

articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily

Tribune.[13] Inheritances from one of Jenny's uncles and her mother who died in 1856

allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious lodgings at 9 Grafton

Terrace, Kentish Town a new suburb on the then-outskirts of London. In 1864, a further

inheritance of money and a house from an old colleague, Wilhelm Wolff allowed the

family to live more comfortably. Marx had, for much of his life until then, generally lived

a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, while striving to

support a middle-class lifestyle for his wife and children.

Marx had seven children by his wife: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844±83); Jenny

Laura (m. Lafargue; 1845±1911); Edgar (1847±1855); Henry Edward Guy ("Guido";

1849±1850); Jenny Eveline Frances ("Franziska"; 1851±52); Jenny Julia

Eleanor (1855±98) and one more who died before being named (July 1857). There are

allegations that Marx also fathered a son out of wedlock by his housekeeper, Helene

Demuth.[14]
Karl Marx's Tomb at Highgate Cemetery London

Following the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that

kept him in ill health for the last 15 months of his life. It eventually brought on

the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on March 14, 1883. He died

a stateless person;[15] family and friends in London buried his body in Highgate

Cemetery, London, on March 17, 1883. There were eleven mourners at his funeral.[16]

Several of Marx's closest friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and

Friedrich Engels. Engels's speech included the words

³ On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living

thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and

when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep²but

forever.[17] ´

In addition to Engels and Liebknecht, Marx's daughter Eleanor and Charles

Longuet and Paul Lafargue, Marx's two French socialist sons-in-law, also attended his
funeral. Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, gave

a speech in German, and Longuet, a prominent figure in the French working-class

movement, made a short statement in French. Two telegrams from workers' parties in

France and Spain were also read out. Together with Engels's speech, this constituted

the entire programme of the funeral. Those attending the funeral included Friedrich

Lessner, who had been sentenced to three years in prison at the Cologne communist

trial of 1852; G. Lochner, who was described by Engels as "an old member of the

Communist League" and Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester, a

member of the Royal Society, but also an old communist associate of Marx and Engels.

Three others attended the funeral²Ray Lankester, Sir John Noe and Leonard Church.

Marx's tombstone bears the carved messages: "WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE",

the final line of The Communist Manifesto, and Engels's version of the 11th Thesis on

Feuerbach:[18]

³ The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways²the point

however is to change it[19] ´

The Communist Party of Great Britain had the monumental tombstone built in 1954 with

a portrait bust by Laurence Bradshaw; Marx's original tomb had had only humble

adornment.[19] In 1970 there was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the monument

using a homemade bomb.[20][21]

Cultural historians may regard Karl Marx as the first major social theorist to form a

series of concepts within the break between modern and premodern societies.[22]
CAREER

"If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no

burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we

shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions,

our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed

the hot tears of noble people."

² Karl Marx, in a letter to his father, 1835

EDUCATION

Marx was privately educated until 1830, when he enrolled at Trier High

School.[11] Enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of seventeen, he wished

to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field

of study.[24] At Bonn he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft

der Treveraner) and at one point served as its president. Because of Marx's poor

grades, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically

oriented University of Berlin, where his legal studies became less significant than

excursions into philosophy and history.

During this period, Marx wrote many poems and essays concerning life, using the

theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity," but

also absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians who were prominent in
Berlin at the time. Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference

Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but he had to submit his

dissertation to theUniversity of Jena as he was warned that his reputation among the

faculty as a Young Hegelian radical would lead to a poor reception in Berlin.[25]

Karl Marx in 1861

Marx was influenced in his formative school years by Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. They

were among his favorite authors, representing even early on his characteristic blend of

German profundity and French subversive wit.

Marx and the Young Hegelians

The Left or Young Hegelians consisted of a group of radical thinkers[25] circling

around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, and opposing their teacherHegel. Despite

their criticism of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, they made use of Hegel's

dialectical method as a powerful weapon for the critique of established politics and

religion. One of them, Max Stirner, turned critically against both Feuerbach and Bauer in

his book "Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum" (1845, The Ego and Its Own), calling these

atheists "pious people" for their reification of abstract concepts. Stirner's work made a

deep impression on Marx, at that time a follower of Feuerbach: he

abandoned Feuerbachian materialism and accomplished what recent authors have

denoted as an "epistemological break." He developed the basic concept of historical

materialism against Stirner in his book, "Die Deutsche Ideologie" (1846, The German

Ideology), which he did not publish.[26] Another link to the Young Hegelians was Moses

Hess, with whom Marx eventually disagreed, yet to whom he owed many of his insights

into the relationship between state, society, and religion. During his years at college, the

official lectures on Hegel left Marx feeling ill, "from intense vexation at having to make

an idol of a view I detested."

Marx in Paris and Brussels

Owing to the conditions of censorship in Prussia, Marx retired from the editorial board of

the Rheinische Zeitung, and planned to publish, with Arnold Ruge, another revolutionary

from Germany, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,[27] (the German-French Annals)

based in Paris, and arrived in late October 1843. Paris at this time served as the home

and headquarters of German, British, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries. In Paris, on

August 28, 1844, at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais he met Friedrich

Engels, who would become his most important friend and life-long companion. Engels

had met Marx only once before (and briefly) at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung in

1842;[28] he went to Paris to show Marx his recently published book, The Condition of

the Working Class in England in 1844.[29] This book convinced Marx that the working

class would be the agent and instrument of the final revolution in history.

After the failure of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx, living on the rue

Vaneau, wrote for the most radical of all German newspapers in Paris, indeed in

Europe, Vorwärts, established and run by the secret society called League of the Just.

When not writing, Marx studied the history of the French Revolution and

read Proudhon.[30] He also spent considerable time studying a side of life he had never

been acquainted with before: a large urban proletariat.

³ [Hitherto exposed mainly to university towns ...] Marx's sudden espousal of the

proletarian cause can be directly attributed (as can that of other early German

communists such as Weitling)[31] to his first hand contacts with socialist

intellectuals [and books] in France.[32] ´

Marx re-evaluated his relationship with the Young Hegelians, and as a reply to

Bauer's atheism wrote On the Jewish Question. This essay consisted mostly of

a critique of current notions of civil and human rights and political emancipation; it also

included several critical references to Judaism as well as Christianity from a standpoint

of social emancipation. Engels, a committed communist, kindled Marx's interest in the

situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics. Marx became a

communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and

Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the

Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the

philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature

of labour under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely

developed their nature in cooperative production.

In January 1845, after Vorwärts expressed its hearty approval of an assassination

attempt on Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, the French authorities ordered Marx,

among many others, to leave Paris. He and Engels moved on to Brussels in Belgium.

Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history, and in collaboration with Engels

elaborated on his idea of historical materialism, particularly in a manuscript (published

posthumously as The German Ideology), which stated as its basic thesis that "the

nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production".

Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of

the present one²industrial capitalism²and its replacement by communism. This was

the first major work of what scholars consider to be his later phase, abandoning the

Feuerbach-influenced humanism of his earlier work.

Next, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a response to Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty and a critique of French socialist thought. These

works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist

Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, as the manifesto of the Communist
League, a small group of European communists who had come under the influence of

Marx and Engels. Later that year, Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions,

and often violent upheavals, the Revolutions of 1848. In February, Marx received a

substantial inheritance from his father of 6000 francs. According to Belgian Ministry of

Justice records Marx allegedly used a third of this money to arm revolution-minded

Belgian workers,[33] while other sources claim the figure was closer to 5000

francs.[34][35] The veracity of the allegations is however disputed.[36] Marx was

subsequently deported from Belgium, though on what grounds is uncertain.

Meanwhile also in February 1848 a radical movement had seized power from

King Louis-Philippe in France and had invited Marx to return to Paris. Arriving there he

witnessed the revolutionary June Days Uprising at first hand. When this collapsed in

1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and started the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New

Rhenish Newspaper"), which he helped to finance through his recent inheritance from

his father.[37] During its existence he went on trial twice, on February 7, 1849, because

of a press misdemeanor, and on the 8th charged with incitement to armed rebellion.

Both times he was acquitted. The paper was soon suppressed and Marx returned to

Paris, but was forced out again. This time he sought refuge in London.

London

Marx moved to London in May 1849 and remained there for the rest of his life. For the

first few years he and his family lived in extreme poverty. He briefly worked as
correspondent for the New York Tribune in 1851.[38] In London Marx devoted himself to

two activities: revolutionary organizing, and an attempt to understand political

economy and capitalism. Having read Engels' study of the working class, Marx turned

away from philosophy and devoted himself to theFirst International, to whose General

Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. He was particularly active in preparing

for the annual Congresses of the International and leading the struggle against

the anarchist wing centered around Mikhail Bakunin (1814±1876). Although Marx won

this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in

1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The most important

political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of

1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for

two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most

famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, a defense of the Commune.

Given the repeated failures and frustrations of workers' revolutions and movements,

Marx also sought to understand capitalism, and spent a great deal of time in the reading

room of the British Museum studying and reflecting on the works of political

economists and on economic data. By 1857 he had accumulated over 800 pages of

notes and short essays on capital, landed, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the

world market; this work did not appear in print until 1941, under the title Grundrisse. In

1859, Marx published Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious

economic work. In the early 1860s he worked on composing three large volumes,

the Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy,

particularly Adam Smithand David Ricardo. This work was published posthumously
under the editorship of Karl Kautsky is often seen as the fourth book of Capital, and

constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought.

In 1867, well behind schedule, the first volume of Capital was published, a work which

analyzed the capitalist process of production. Here, Marx elaborated his labor theory of

value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which he argued would

ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism.

Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work for

the rest of his life and were published posthumously by Engels.

During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he became incapable of

the sustained effort that had characterized his previous work. He did manage to

comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia.

His Critique of the Gotha Programme opposed the tendency of his followers Wilhelm

Liebknecht (1826±1900) and August Bebel (1840±1913) to compromise with the state

socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party.

In a letter to Vera Zasulich dated March 8, 1881, Marx even contemplated the possibility

of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on

the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village mir.[39] While

admitting that Russia's rural "commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia",

Marx also warned that in order for the mir to operate as a means for moving straight to

the socialist stage without a preceding capitalist stage, it "would first be necessary to

eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it (the rural commune) from all

sides".[40] Given the elimination of these pernicious influences, Marx allowed, that

"normal conditions of spontaneous development" of the rural commune could

exist.[41] However, in the same letter to Vera Zaulich, Marx points out that "at the core of

the capitalist system ... lies the complete separation of the producer from the means of

production".[42] Marx can be forgiven for not seeing at this early stage in 1881, the

conditions inside the rural commune that would soon lead to the "differentiation of the

peasantry" within the Russian rural commune and the gradual separation of many

peasants within the commune from the means of production.[citation needed]

Writing with the advantage of nearly twenty additional years of closer observation of the

rural communes in Russia, V. I. Lenin was able to conclude that the rural commune

could not be the agent socialist development in Russia, exactly because increasing

numbers of Russian peasants within the rural communes were being separated from

the means of production within the rural commune.[43]Within the Russian rural

commune, land was the "means of production". Ideally, all peasants in the rural

commune would own or have access to an equal share of the land operated by the

commune. Lenin's close analysis of the communes concludes that not all peasants

within the rural commune had equal access to land. Indeed, at the time that Lenin wrote

his book (1899), there was already a drastic difference between the amount of land

cultivated by some rich kulak peasants as opposed to other poorer peasants within the

rural commune.[44] Furthermore, this condition was not static. Rather the "differentiation

of the peasantry" within the rural commune was an ongoing process. More and more

small peasants within the rural commune were becoming unable to support themselves

on the small amount of land they had access to within the rural commune.

Inevitably, many poor peasants within the rural communes across Russia were actually

"landless". As the years went by many more of the small peasants within the rural
communes were becoming landless as the process of "differentiation of the peasantry"

allowed the rich peasants to become richer and the poor peasants became poorer.

Some of the landless peasants were required to seek employment from the richer

"kulak" peasants within the rural commune. These landless peasants would be

considered a part of the rural proletariat. Other landless peasants would leave the

commune altogether and join the urban proletariat. Whichever way the landless peasant

went, Lenin points out that this development is totally familiar to us as nothing more or

less than the familiar process of the ruin and "proletariatization" of the small peasantry,

by the complete separation of that small "landless" peasantry from the means of

production.

MARX¶S THOUGHT

Main article: Marxism

A Karl Marx monument in the German city Chemnitz, formerly the East

German city Karl-Marx-Stadt (Karl Marx City)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The American Marx scholar Hal Draper once remarked, "there are few thinkers in

modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-

Marxists alike." The legacy of Marx's thought has become bitterly contested between

numerous tendencies which each see themselves as Marx's most accurate interpreters,

including (but not limited to) Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Luxemburgism,

and libertarian Marxism.

Influences on Marx's thought

Main article: Influences on Karl Marx

Marx's thought demonstrates strong influences from:

Ú Hegel's dialectical method and historical orientation;

Ú the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;

Ú French socialist and sociological thought, in particular the thought of Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier;

Ú earlier German philosophical materialism, particularly that of Ludwig Feuerbach;

Ú the solidarity with the working class of Friedrich Engels.

Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism (controversially

adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin) certainly

shows the influence of Hegel's claim that one should view reality (and

history) dialectically. Hegel believed that human history is characterized by the

movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a

movement towards greater and greater rationality). This progressive unfolding ofthe

Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion which culminates in revolutionary

leaps and episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel

strongly opposed slavery in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a

time when Christian nations would eliminate it from their civilization.

Marx's critiques of German philosophical idealism, British political economy, and French

socialism depended heavily on the influence of Feuerbach and Engels. Hegel had

thought in idealist terms, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He

wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that one needed

to set it upon its feet. Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which

rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly 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 ofhumanity. 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 ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their

lives clearly.

The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism came from Engels'

book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, 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. Engels' article

"Outlines of Political Economy" in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher also had a

great influence in directing him towards the study of the workings of the capitalist

economy.

Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern

tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of

Marx concluded, therefore, that a communist revolution would inevitably occur.

However, Marx famously asserted in the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach that

"philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to

change it", and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world. Consequently,

most followers of Marx espouse not fatalism, but activism: they believe that

revolutionaries must organize social change.

Philosophy
Main article: Marxist philosophy

See also: Marx's theory of human nature and Marx's theory of alienation

Further information: The Poverty of Philosophy, Economic and Philosophical

Manuscripts of 1844, and Theses on Feuerbach

Fundamentally, Marx assumed that human nature involves transforming material

nature. To this process of transformation he applies the term "labour", and to the

capacity to transform nature the term "labour power". Marx stated:

³ 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. ´

² (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1)

Unlike insects and arachnids, humans recognise that they possess both actual and

potential selves.[46][47] For both Marx and Hegel, self-development begins with an

experience of internal alienationstemming from this recognition, followed by a realisation

that the actual self, as a subjective agent, renders its potential counterpart an object to

be apprehended.[47] Marx further argues that, by molding nature[48] in desired

ways,[49] the subject takes the object as its own, and thus permits the individual to be

actualised as fully human. For Marx, then, human nature²Gattungswesen, orspecies-

being²exists as a function of human labour.[46][47][49] Fundamental to Marx's idea of

meaningful labour is the proposition that, in order for a subject to come to terms with its

alienated object, it must first exert influence upon literal, material objects in the subject's
world.[50] Marx acknowledges that Hegel "grasps the nature of work and comprehends

objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work",[51] but

characterises Hegelian self-development as unduly "spiritual" and abstract.[52] Marx thus

departs from Hegel by insisting that "the fact that man is a corporeal, actual, sentient,

objective being with natural capacities means that he has actual, sensuous objects for

his nature as objects of his life-expression, or that he can only express his life in actual

sensuous objects."[50] Consequently, Marx revises Hegelian "work" into material labour.

Marx's analysis of history focuses on the organisation of labor and depends on his

distinction between:

1. the means / forces of production, literally those things (like land, natural

resources, and technology) necessary for the production of material goods; and

2. the relations of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter

into as they acquire and use the means of production.

Together these compose the mode of production, and Marx distinguished historical eras

in terms of distinct modes of production. For example, he observed that European

societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of

production. Marx believed that under capitalism, the means of production change more

rapidly than the relations of production. Marx regarded this mismatch between

(economic) base and (social) superstructure as a major source of social disruption and

conflict.

As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as 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 resources²that

is, whether or not a group owns the means of production. For Marx:

³ The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. ´

² (The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1)

Marx had a special concern with how people relate to that most fundamental resource

of all, their own labour power. He 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. Capitalism mediates social relationships of

production (such as among workers or between workers and capitalists) through

commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market. For Marx, the

possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labor²one's capacity to

transform the world²is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a

spiritual loss. Marx described this loss as commodity fetishism, in which the things that

people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which

humans and their behavior merely adapt.

Commodity fetishism provides an example of what Engels called "false consciousness",

which relates closely to the understanding of ideology. By "ideology", Marx and Engels

meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history,

but which contemporaries see as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not

only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; 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 produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect

(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 preface[53] to his 1843 Contribution to

the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:

³ 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. ´

² (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)

Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that religion had as its primary social aim

the promotion of solidarity, here Marx sees the social function of religion in terms of

highlighting/preserving political and economic inequality. Moreover, he provides an

analysis of the ideological functions of religion: to reveal "an inverted consciousness of

the world." He continues: "It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service

of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms, once religion, the holy

form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked". For Marx, this unholy self-

estrangement, the "loss of man", is complete once the proletariat realizes its potential to
unite in revolutionary solidarity. His final conclusion is that for Germany, general human

emancipation is only possible as a suspension of private property by the proletariat.

Political economy

Main article: Das Kapital

Memorial to Karl Marx in Moscow. The inscription reads "ɉɪɨɥɟɬɚɪɢɢ ɜɫɟɯ ɫɬɪɚɧ,

ɫɨɟɞɢɧɹɣɬɟɫɶ!" (Proletarians of all countries, unite!)

Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism)

functions precisely as 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 commodity²when peasants became free to sell their own

labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land.

People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever

work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they do not sell the product of
their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor-power they receive

money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor-power are

"proletarians". The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own

the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois". The proletarians

inevitably outnumber the capitalists.

Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants

buy goods in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and

demand operate within given markets, a difference often exists between the price of a

commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practise arbitrage, and 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 the capitalist can produce. Marx observed that in

practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices.

Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its

source in surplus labour, the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and

what they can produce.

Capitalism can stimulate considerable growth because the capitalist can, and has an

incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies and capital equipment. Marx

considered the capitalist class to be one of the most revolutionary in history, because it

constantly improved the means of production. But Marx argued 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 recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy

would collapse. Marx thought that during such an economic crisis the price of labour

would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and

the growth of new sectors of the economy.

Marx believed that increasingly severe crises would punctuate this cycle of growth,

collapse, and more growth. Moreover, he believed that in the long-term this process

would necessarily enrich andempower the capitalist class and impoverish the

proletariat. He believed that if the proletariat were 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. He theorized that between

capitalism and the establishment of a socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat²

a period where the working class holds political power and forcibly socializes the means

of production²would exist. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program",

"between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary

transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political

transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of

the proletariat."[54] While he allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some

countries with strong democratic institutional structures (such as Britain, the US and the

Netherlands), he suggested that in other countries with strong centralized state-oriented

traditions, like France and Germany, the "lever of our revolution must be force."

As a founder of social science

Marx is typically cited, along with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three

principal architects of modern social science.[8] Both Marx and Auguste Comte set out to

develop scientifically justified ideologies in the wake of European secularisation and

new developments in the philosophies of history and science. Whilst Marx, working in

the Hegelian tradition, rejected Comteansociological positivism, in attempting to develop

a science of society he nevertheless came to be recognized as a founder of sociology

as the word gained wider meaning. For Isaiah Berlin, Marx may be regarded as the

"true father" of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone can claim the title."

To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical

questions which most occupied men's minds at the time, and to have deduced from

them clear practical directives without creating obviously artificial links between the two,

was the principle achievement of Marx's theory ... The sociological treatment of

historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had

discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of

militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for

evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense.

± Isaiah Berlin Karl Marx: His Life and Environment 1937,

MARX¶S INFLUENCE

³ The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the ´

 history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts

the future, but in addition to predicting it, he expresses a revolutionary concept:

the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed.

² Che Guevara, Marxist revolutionary

The work 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 grand, cohesive theoretical outlooks dubbed

"Marxism". Nevertheless, Marxists have frequently debated amongst themselves over

how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to their contemporary

events and conditions. Moreover, one should distinguish between "Marxism" and "what

Marx believed"; for example, shortly before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the

French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue,

accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of lack of faith in the working

class. After the French party split into a reformist and revolutionary party, some accused

Guesde (leader of the latter) of taking orders from Marx; Marx remarked to Lafargue, "if

that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist" (in a letter to Engels, Marx later accused

Guesde of being a "Bakuninist").[59]

Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" in one of two ways:

1. to describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (for example: "mode

of production", "class", "commodity fetishism") to understand capitalist and other

societies; or:
 2. to describe those who regard a workers' revolution as the only means to a

communist society.

Some, particularly in academic circles, who accept much of Marx's theory, but not all its

implications, call themselves "Marxian" instead.

Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a

base for continued political activism. This organization proved far more successful than

the First International: it included mass workers' parties, particularly the large and

successful Social Democratic Party of Germany, which predominantly expressed a

Marxist outlook. The Second International collapsed in 1914, however, 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 of 1917, in the later stages of which a

left-wing splinter-group of the Second International, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir

Lenin, took power. The Russian Revolution dynamized workers around the world into

setting up their own section of the Bolsheviks' "Third International". Lenin presented

himself as both the philosophical and the political heir to Marx, and developed a political

program, called "Leninism" or "Bolshevism", which called for revolution organized and

led by a centrally organized vanguard "Communist Party".

Marx believed that communist revolution would take place in advanced industrial

societies such as France, Germany and England, but Lenin argued that in the age

of imperialism, and due to the "law of uneven development", where Russia had on the

one hand, an antiquated agricultural society, but on the other hand, some of the most

up-to-date industrial concerns, the "chain" might break at its weakest points, that is, in
the so-called "backward" countries, and then ignite revolution in the advanced industrial

societies of Europe, where society is ready for socialism, and which could then in turn

come to the aid of the workers' state in Russia.[60]

Marx and Engels make a very significant comment in the preface to the Russian edition

of the Communist Manifesto:

³ Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet

a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of

Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through

the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the

West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution

becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both

complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may

serve as the starting point for a communist development. ´

² (Marx and Engels, Preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto)

Marx's words served as a starting point for Lenin,[61] who, together with Trotsky, always

believed that the Russian revolution must become a "signal for a proletarian revolution

in the West". Supporters of Trotsky argue that the failure of revolution in the West (along

the lines envisaged by Marx) to come to the aid of the Russian revolution after 1917 led

to the rise of Stalinism.[62] and set the cast of human history for seventy years.
100 Mark der DDR note used in the German Democratic Republic. 100-Mark banknotes

with Marx's portrait circulated from 1964 until monetary union with West Germany in

July 1990.

In China Mao Zedong also portrayed himself as an heir to Marx, but argued that

peasants²not just workers²could play leading roles in a Communist revolution, even

in third-world countries marked by peasant feudalism in the absence of industrial

workers. Mao termed this the New Democratic Revolution. Marxism-Leninism as

espoused by Mao became known internationally as "Maoism".

Under Lenin, and particularly under Joseph Stalin, Bolshevik oppression came to

characterise Marxism abroad. Capitalism-oriented western states encouraged this

impression, as did the politics of the Cold War. There were, nonetheless, always

dissenting Marxist voices²Marxists of the old school of the Second International,

the left communists who split off from the Third International shortly after its formation,

and later Leon Trotsky and his followers, who set up a "Fourth International" in 1938 to

compete with the Stalinist conception of Marxism.

Statue of Marx and Engels in the Statue Park, Budapest

Coming from the Second International milieu in the 1920s and 1930s, a group of

dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among

them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a

group, these authors became known as theFrankfurt School. Their school of thought,

known as Critical Theory, represents a type of Marxist philosophy and cultural criticism

heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.

The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and the Bolshevists in

several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendancy of Stalinism, they had

grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness.

Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejectedeconomic determinism.

Though the Frankfurt School became highly influential, both orthodox Marxists and

some Marxists involved in political practice have criticized their work for

divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely

academic enterprise.
Influential Marxists of the same period include the Third International's Georg

Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, both often grouped along with the Frankfurt School under

the term "Western Marxism". Marx was also an important influence on the German

philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, an occasional associate of Adorno and

the Frankfurt School.

In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press,

to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of theAmerican

Communist Party.

In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific

theory of history by restating its central tenets in the language of analytic philosophy.

This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic movement which also included Jon

Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell Ollmanbecame

another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy, as did the Israeli Shlomo

Avineri.

In Marx's 'Das Kapital' (2006), biographer Francis Wheen reiterates David

McLellan's observation that since Marxism had not triumphed in the West, "it had not

been turned into an official ideology and is thus the object of serious study unimpeded

by government controls".

The following countries at some point had governments with leadership which at least

nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still did as of

2009): Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China,Cuba, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, E

ast Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia,

Nepal, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Soviet

Union, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In addition, the Indian states of Kerala, Tripura and West

Bengal have had Marxist governments.

Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined in influence since

the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably Nepal.

In July 2005, 27.9% of listeners in a BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time poll selected Marx

as their favorite thinker.[63]

Accusations of antisemitism

Some authors like Bernard Lewis, Edward H. Flannery and Hyam Maccoby, view

Marx's On The Jewish Question as an antisemitic work, and identify what they contend

are antisemitic epithets in his published and private writings.[64][65] According to them,

Marx regarded Jews as the embodiment of capitalism and thus the creators of its

evils.[66]

The above authors often quote the following excerpt from On The Jewish Question to

support their arguments:

³ What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness. What is the

secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money. Well then, an

emancipation from haggling and money, from practical, real Judaism would be

the self emancipation of our age...

...The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from

Judaism.[67] ´
On the other hand, the political-scientist Professor Iain Hamphsher-Monk wrote in his

textbook: "This work [On The Jewish Question] has been cited as evidence for Marx's

supposed anti-semitism, but only the most superficial reading of it could sustain such an

interpretation."[68] Also, McLellan and Francis Wheen argue readers should interpret On

the Jewish Question in the context of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer, author of The

Jewish Question, about Jewish emancipation in Germany. Francis Wheen says: "Those

critics, who see this as a foretaste of 'Mein Kampf', overlook one, essential point: in

spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written

as a defense of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews

should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as

Christians", although Wheen also says that Marx "sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his

enemies with savage glee".[69] According to McLellan, Marx used the

word Judentum colloquially, as meaning commerce, arguing that Germans suffer, and

must be emancipated from, capitalism. McLellan concludes that readers should interpret

the essay's second half as an extended pun at Bauer's expense.[70] Jonathan

Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, regards application of the term

"antisemitism" to Marx as an anachronism²because when Marx wrote On the Jewish

Question, virtually all major philosophers expressed antisemitic tendencies, but the

word "antisemitism" had not yet been coined, let alone developed a racial component,

and little awareness existed of the depths of European prejudice against Jews. Marx

thus simply expressed the commonplace thinking of his era, according to Sacks.[71]

WORKS (SELECTION)
Ú The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law (1842)

Ú Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843

Ú On the Jewish Question, 1843

Ú Notes on James Mill, 1844

Ú Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 1844

Ú The Holy Family, 1845

Ú Theses on Feuerbach, 1845

Ú The German Ideology, 1845

Ú The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847

Ú Wage-Labor and Capital, 1847

Ú Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848

Ú The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852

Ú Grundrisse, 1857

Ú A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859

Ú Writings on the U.S. Civil War, 1861

Ú Theories of Surplus Value, 3 volumes, 1862

Ú Value, Price and Profit, 1865

Ú Capital, Volume I (Das Kapital), 1867

Ú The Civil War in France, 1871

Ú Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875

Ú Notes on Wagner, 1883

Ú Capital, Volume II [posthumously published by Engels], 1885

Ú Capital, Volume III [posthumously published by Engels], 1894