Karl Marx

Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Era	19th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Marxism
Main interests	Political philosophy, Social philosophy, Philosophy of economics, Politics, Economics, class struggle
Notable ideas	Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels), alienation and exploitation of the worker, historical materialism

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely influential philosopher, political economist, and socialist revolutionary. While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

At the same time as Friedrich Engels, Marx took part in the political and philosophical struggle of his times, writing the Communist Manifesto a year before the Revolutions of 1848, although the two events had nothing to do with each other. Marx had broken with his university environment, German Idealism and the Young Hegelians, and took part in the debates of the European workers' movement, in particular in relation with the First International founded in 1864. He published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867, a few years before the 1871 Paris Commune.

The influence of his ideas, already popular during his life, was given added impetus by the victory of the Russian Bolsheviks in the 1917 October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxist ideas in the course of the twentieth century. The relation of Marx's own thought to the popular "Marxist" interpretations of it during this period is a point of controversy; he himself once said that "the only thing I know is that I'm not a Marxist" (in response to the views of a French Social-Democratic Party calling itself "Marxist").

While Marx's ideas have declined in popularity, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet regime, they are still very influential today, both in academic circles, some worker movements, and in political practice, and Marxism continues to be the official ideology of some Communist states and political movements.

After studying philosophy and law in Prussia (Germany) being awarded a doctorate by the (then) University of Jena, he became a journalist. The claims that Marx was initiating what amounted to a religion date from correspondence as early as 1842, when Marx was still at the purely atheistic stage of his development.

With his close friend Friedrich Engels, he wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, followed by numerous other works. Although Marx did not invent socialism, he soon dominated the movement, and his theories came to be known as Marxism.

His radical ideas led to successive exiles which forced him to Paris, Brussels, and finally London, where he became a British citizen. There, Marx spent years reading, researching, and writing in the British Museum.

Most biographers have said that while Marx was supported financially by Engels, he nevertheless lived in poverty with his wife the Baroness Jenny von Westphalen, their children and maid, Helene Demuth. With his wife, Marx had six children, although only three survived into adulthood: Jenny, Laura and Eleanor, who was a significant socialist in her own right. In addition, it is often said that Marx fathered a son with Demuth, (Frederic), who was put out to adoption, Marx never acknowledging his paternity.

However, Francis Wheen, in preparing a biography of Marx using the extensive personal papers and financial records of the Marx family, disclosed that in fact Marx was a workaholic who earned a comfortable Victorian middle-class salary working full-time as the London correspondent of the New York Tribune, as well a comfortable additional income as the London correspondent of a number of German newspapers. Engels helped the family with gifts roughly equivalent to another middle-class income.

However, both Marx and his baroness wife came from a independently-wealthy families, and never adapted their lifestyle to their more modest income. Not only did they maintain a live-in servant, but paid for the best education for their children, for homes in the most fashionable areas of London, and for the most expensive tailor-made clothing from London's top designers. Quite hopeless with money, they never managed to live within their ample means, and continuously cadged shamelessly from their relatives. On a possibly more positive note, they were always profligately generous to charities and with their friends, for example, on their honeymoon they gave away a chest of gold coins to their student guests.

Francis Wheen also finds little hard evidence to support the contention that Marx was the father of Helene Demuth's child. While the claim is certainly possible, the allegations only surfaced late in the twentieth-century, based on an account of a purported death-bed confession of Engels to an acquaintance.^[1]

Marx suffered many health ailments over the course of his adult life. Carbuncles (along with bronchitis and liver problems) prevented him from working on many occasions, thereby extending the writing time of many of his works and endangering the financial stability of his family.^[2]

His association with Engels concluded with the three-volume Das Kapital, the last two volumes of which Engels wrote from Marx's rough notes and manuscripts. Other works by Marx were not published until the twentieth century.

Karl Marx was buried on 17 March 1883 at Highgate Cemetary in London. Only eleven people attended his funeral.^[3]

Influences on Marx's thought

Marx's thought was strongly influenced by-

The dialectical method and historical orientation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel;
The classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;
French socialist and sociological thought, in particular the republican conception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's critique of private property;
German Idealism and the young Hegelians, in particular Ludwig Feuerbach.
Antique materialism (Democritus and Epicure's theory of clinamen)
The anti-capitalist struggle in the English industrial region of Lancashire

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 was inevitable. This conception, shared by the young Marx (who formulated it in the Communist Manifesto but later abandoned it), however, did not entail fatalism. In the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (1845), Marx had famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it"; he thusly opposed praxis (the unity of theory and practice) to idealist interpretations which opposed themselves as various philosophical Weltanschauungen (worldviews). Marx thus cut with Prussian university in order to work with the labour movement in order to try to alter the world. Consequently, most followers of Marx have been activists who believed that revolutionaries must organize social change.

Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism (controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin, a term never used by Marx himself) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — 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 radically eliminate it from their civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary 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 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 ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.

The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was 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.

Marx's influence

File:AlexanderplatzMarxEngels.JPG

Statue of Marx and Engels in the Marx-Engels Forum, Berlin.

Marx and Engels' work 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 grand, cohesive theoretical outlook 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. Moreover, it is important to 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 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 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 was far more successful than the First International had been, containing mass workers' parties, particularly the large and successful German Social Democratic Party, which was predominantly Marxist in outlook. This 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 in which a left splinter of the Second International, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took power. The revolution influenced workers around the world into setting up their own section of the Bolsheviks' "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."

Marx believed that the 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.

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 third world countries still marked by feudalism whose majority of workers were peasants, not industrial workers. This was termed by Mao as the New Democratic Revolution. As a departure from Marx's understanding of the socialist revolution that maintained that the revolution must take place with countries that have already gone through the capitalist stage of development first and have produced the proletarian class as the majority, which is to carry out the revolutionary transformation of society into a socialist country and communist world. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism.

Under Lenin, and increasingly after the rise to power of Joseph Stalin, the actions of the Soviet Union (and later of the People's Republic of China) came in many people's mind to be synonymous with Marxism, with its attendant suppression of the rights of individuals and workers in the name of the struggle against capitalism, including the execution of large numbers of people under Stalin, a fact which has been used by anti-Communists against Marxism. However, there were throughout dissenting Marxist voices — Marxists 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 that of Stalin, claiming to represent true Bolshevism.

Statue of Marx and Engels in the Statue Park, Budapest.

Coming from the Second International milieu, in the 1920s and '30s, 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 are often called the Frankfurt School. Their work is known as Critical Theory, 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 Bolshevism in several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendance of Stalinism and fascism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice 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 Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism.

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 the 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 Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy, as is the Israeli Shlomo Avineri.

The following countries had governments at some point in the twentieth century who at least nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still do as of 2006): Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, Somalia, the USSR and its republics, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In addition, the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal have had Marxist governments.

Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably Nepal.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Karl Marx was the most cited authority overall, followed by a Marxist: Vladimir Lenin.^[4]

Marx was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history, and #3 on the German television show "Unsere Besten".

In July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner of the 'Greatest Philosopher of All Time' poll by listeners of the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time.^[5]

References

Avineri, Shlomo, 1968. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge University Press.
Avineri, Shlomo, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (UK, Cambridge, 1968)
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment.
Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (4 volumes). Monthly Review Press.
Ronald Duncan, with Wilson, Colin, eds., 1987. Marx Refuted. Bath, UK ISBN-X
Stephen Jay Gould, A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral - E. Ray Lankester, Page 1, Find Articles.com (1999). (Marx's tomb)
Sterling Harwood, "Madisonian Democracy and Marxist Analysis: Ryder on the Constitution," in Christopher B. Gray, ed., Philosophical Reflections on the United States Constitution (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), pp. 29-36, reprinted in Sterling Harwood, ed., Business as Ethical and Business as Usual (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996), pp. 341-344.
Daniel Little, 1986. The Scientific Marx. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN. Marx's work considered as science.
David McLellen, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
Jerry Z. Muller, 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. Anchor Books.
Boris Nicolaevski & Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, Penguin books.
Maximilien Rubel, 1975. Marx without myth: A chronological study of his life and work. Blackwell. ISBN
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate (1999), ISBN (biography of Marx).

Notes

^ Francis Wheen's Karl Marx: A Life
^ Francis Wheen. 1999. Karl Marx: A Life. London: WW Norton & Company.
^ Francis Wheen. 1999. Karl Marx: A Life. London: WW Norton & Company. p382.
^ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1992/citation-0415.html
^ http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1530250,00.html

External links

Influences on Marx's thought

Marx's influence

References

Notes

See also

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Bibliography and online texts

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