Everything about Karl Marx totally explained
Karl Heinrich Marx (
May 5,
1818 –
March 14,
1883) was a 19th century
philosopher,
political economist, and
revolutionary. Often called the
father of
communism, Marx was both a scholar and a political activist. He addressed a wide range of political as well as social issues, and is known for, amongst other things, his analysis of history. His approach is indicated by the opening line of the
The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles”. Marx argued that
capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced
feudalism, capitalism itself will be displaced by
communism, a
classless society which emerges after a transitional period in which the state would be nothing else but the revolutionary
dictatorship of the proletariat.
On the one hand, Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socioeconomic change. On this model, it's the structural contradictions within capitalism which necessitate its end, giving way to communism:
On the other hand, Marx argued that socioeconomic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. On this model, 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." (from
The German Ideology)
While Marx was a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence was given added impetus by the victory of the
Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian
October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. The relation of Marx to "Marxism" is a point of controversy. Marxism remains influential and controversial in
academic and
political circles.
Biography
Karl Heinrich Marx was born the third of seven children of a
Jewish family in
Trier, in the
Kingdom of Prussia's
Province of the Lower Rhine. His father, Heinrich (1777–1838), who had descended from a long line of
rabbis, converted to
Christianity, despite his many
deistic tendencies and his admiration of such
Enlightenment figures as
Voltaire and
Rousseau. Marx's father was actually born Herschel Mordechai, but when the Prussian authorities wouldn't allow him to continue practicing law as a Jew, he joined the official denomination of the Prussian state,
Lutheranism, which accorded him advantages, as one of a small minority of Lutherans in a predominantly
Roman Catholic region. His mother was Henrietta (
née Pressburg; 1788–1863); his siblings were Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise (m. Juta), Emilie and Caroline.
Education
Marx was educated at home until the age of thirteen. After graduating from the Trier
Gymnasium, Marx enrolled in the
University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of seventeen to study
law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a result. Marx was interested in studying philosophy and literature, but his father wouldn't allow it because he didn't believe that his son would be able to comfortably support himself in the future as a scholar. The following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in
Berlin. 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'd to submit his dissertation to the
University 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.
Marx and the Young Hegelians
The
Left, or
Young Hegelians, consisted of a group of philosophers and journalists circling around
Ludwig Feuerbach and
Bruno Bauer opposing their teacher
Hegel. Despite their criticism of Hegel's
metaphysical assumptions, they made use of Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, as a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-
Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. 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. Marx, at that time a follower of Feuerbach, was deeply impressed by the work and 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 didn't publish.
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.
Towards the end of October 1843, Marx arrived in
Paris,
France. There, on August 28, 1844, at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais he began the most important friendship of his life, and one of the most important in history – he met
Friedrich Engels. Engels had come to Paris specifically to see Marx, whom he'd met only briefly at the office of the
Rheinische Zeitung in 1842. He came to show Marx what would turn out to be perhaps Engels' greatest work,
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Paris at this time was the home and headquarters to armies of German, British, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries. Marx, for his part, had come to Paris to work with
Arnold Ruge, another revolutionary from Germany, on the
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher .
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, the
Vorwärts, established and run by the secret society called
League of the Just. Marx's topics were generally on the Jewish question and Hegel. When not writing, Marx studied the history of the French Revolution and read
Proudhon. He also spent considerable time studying a side of life he'd never been acquainted with before – a large urban proletariat.
He re-evaluated his relationship with the Young Hegelians, and as a reply to Bauer's
atheism wrote
On the Jewish Question. This essay was mostly a
critique of current notions of
civil and
human rights and political
emancipation, which 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 labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production.
In January 1845, after the
Vorwärts expressed its hearty approval regarding the assassination attempt on the life of
Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, Marx, among many others, were ordered to leave
Paris. He and Engels moved on to
Brussels,
Belgium.
Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated on his idea of historical materialism, particularly in a manuscript (published posthumously as
The German Ideology), the basic thesis of which was 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 one—industrial capitalism—and 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 to be influenced by Marx and Engels.
Later that year,
Europe experienced tremendous revolutionary upheaval. Marx was arrested and expelled from Belgium; in the meantime a radical movement had seized power from King
Louis-Philippe in France, and invited Marx to return to Paris, where he witnessed the revolutionary
June Days Uprising first hand.
When this collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and started the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish Newspaper"). During its existence he was put 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, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He briefly worked as correspondent for the
New York Tribune in 1851. In 1855, the Marx family suffered a blow with the death of their son, Edgar, from tuberculosis. Meanwhile, Marx's major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857 he'd produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market. This work however wasn't published until 1941, under the title
Grundrisse. 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 Smith and
David Ricardo. This work, that 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. In 1859, Marx was able to publish
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work. In his journalistic work of this period, Marx championed the
Union cause in the
American Civil War.
One reason why Marx was so slow to publish
Capital was that he was devoting his time and energy to the
First 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 led by
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, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune.
During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he was 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. In Germany, in his
Critique of the Gotha Programme, he 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 his correspondence with Vera Zasulich, Marx 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.
Family life
Karl Marx was married to
Jenny von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron. Karl Marx's engagement to her was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed by both the Marxes and Westphalens. Despite the objections, the two were married on June 19, 1843 in Kreuznacher Pauluskirche,
Bad Kreuznach.
During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty and constant fear of creditors in a three room flat on Dean Street in the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and three more were to follow. Of these only three survived to adulthood. Marx's major source of income at this time was Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family business in
Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the
New York Daily Tribune. 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. Marx generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, although this did extend to some spending on relatively bourgeois luxuries, which he felt were necessities for his wife and children given their social status and the mores of the time.
There is a disputed rumour that Marx was the father of Frederick Demuth, the son of Marx's housekeeper, Lenchen Demuth. It has been suggested that this rumour lacks any direct corroboration.
Marx's children by his wife were:
Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–1883);
Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1845–1911); Edgar (1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy ("Guido"; 1849–1850); Jenny Eveline Frances ("Franziska"; 1851–1852); Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–1898); and one more who died before being named (July 1857).
Death and legacy
Following the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a
catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last fifteen 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 and was buried in
Highgate Cemetery, London, on
17 March,
1883. The messages carved on Marx's
tombstone are: “
WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE”, the final line of
The Communist Manifesto, and Engels' version of the 11th
Thesis on Feuerbach:
The tombstone was a monument built in 1954 by the
Communist Party of Great Britain with a portrait bust by Laurence Bradshaw; Marx's original tomb had been humbly adorned. In 1970, there was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the monument, with a homemade bomb.
Several of Marx's closest friends spoke at his funeral, including
Wilhelm Liebknecht and
Friedrich Engels. Engels' speech included the words:
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, gave a short statement in French. Two telegrams from workers' parties in France and Spain were also read out. Together with Engels' speech, this was the entire programme of the funeral. Also attending the funeral was 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 funeral —
Ray Lankester, Sir John Noe and Leonard Church — making eleven in all.
Marx's daughter
Eleanor became a socialist like her father and helped edit his works.
Marx's thought
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 is bitterly contested between numerous tendencies who claim to be Marx's most accurate interpreters, including
Marxist-Leninism,
Trotskyism,
Maoism, and
libertarian Marxism.
Philosophy
Marx's philosophy hinges on his view of human nature. Along with the
Hegelian dialectic, Marx inherited a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting “nature” with “history.” Sometimes they use the phrase “existence precedes consciousness.” In either case, a person is determined by where and when the person is — social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability. Nevertheless, Marxian thought rests on the fundamental assumption that it's
human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "
labour" and the capacity to transform nature "
labour power." For Marx, this is a natural capacity for physical activity, but it's intimately tied to the active role of human consciousness:
Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the
means / forces of production, literally those things such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the
relations of production, in other words, the social and technical 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. 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 mismatch between (economic) base and (social)
superstructure is a major source of social disruption and 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 didn't 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
resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Conflict between social classes being something which is inherent in all human history:
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's a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of
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. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market.
Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called
false consciousness, which is closely related to the 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 wasn't 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 to his 1843
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
Whereas his
Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote
solidarity, here Marx sees the social function in terms of 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 for the sphere of the proletariat. His final conclusion is that for Germany, general human emancipation is only possible as a suspension of private property by the proletariat.
Political economy
Marx argued that this alienation of human work (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 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're not selling 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, there's often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice
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 is produced by the capitalist. 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.
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 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 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 enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they'd encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would be required, because the ruling class wouldn't give up power without violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor - must be created on a temporary basis. 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."
While he allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic institutional structures (for example 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."
Marx and antisemitism
Some commentators have maintained that Marx's
On The Jewish Question was an antisemitic work, and that he made use of antisemitic epithets in his published and private writings.
According to
Edward H. Flannery, Marx was an antisemite who considered Jews worshippers of mammon, the very soul of the corrupt capitalism he fought. According to several other scholars, for Marx Jews were the embodiment of capitalism and the creators of all its evils. In their view, Marx's equation of Judaism with capitalism, together with his pronouncements on Jews, strongly influenced socialist movements and shaped their attitudes and policies toward the Jews. In those scholar's opinion, Marx's 'On the Jewish Question' influenced
National Socialist, as well as Soviet and Arab anti-Semites
Hyam Maccoby has argued that Marx's early
anti-Semitism is shown in his 1843 essay "
On the Jewish Question." Marx wrote:
According to Leon Boim, professor at
Tel-Aviv University:
» It would appear unlikely to find in any single work such an accumulation of all the anti-Semitic stereotypes, from those used in the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion through the Nazi vocabulary and up to the Soviet anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli slogans. According to Marx, Judaism corrupted the entire human kind. All the evil and wickedness of the Christian world – materialism and selfishness, the worship of money and private property – originated from Judaism. Moreover, in his opinion, Jews polluted and corrupted the Christian world because of their natural greed, their being exploiters, money being their god, because they were the embodiment of huckstering, because their religion was full of scorn towards theory, art and human history.
» True, this was written in his youth, before the final crystallization of his socialist outlook; however, as stated by Silberner, Marx expressed his anti-Jewish feelings in numerous remarks such as "dirty Jews" or, when he wrote of Polish Jews that "they multiply like lice," not to speak of his abovementioned remarks concerning Lassalle which were uttered much later.
Jonathan Sacks has written that virtually all major enlightenment philosophers were antisemitic, including
Voltaire,
Kant,
Hegel and
Nietzsche. At the time Marx wrote "On the Jewish Question", the word "
antisemitism" hadn't yet been coined or developed a racial component, and there was little awareness of the depths of European prejudice against Jews. Marx was thus simply expressing, in Sacks's view, the commonplace thinking of his era.
Maccoby has suggested that Marx was
embarrassed by his Jewish background, noting "that anyone who uses Jews as the yardstick of evil is being antisemitic". Moreover, Maccoby claims that in later years, Marx's anti-Semitism was mostly limited to private letters and conversations because of strong public identification with anti-Semitism by his political enemies both on the left (
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and
Mikhail Bakunin) and on the right (aristocracy and the Church).
Bernard Lewis found many instances of anti-Semitic language in Marx's later work.
In contrast,
David McLellan and
Francis Wheen have argued that "On the Jewish Question" must be understood in terms of Marx's debates with
Bruno Bauer over the nature of political emancipation in Germany. Wheen asserts: "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 defence of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews shouldn't be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians." According to McLellan, Marx used the word "Judentum" in its colloquial sense of "commerce" to argue that Germans suffer, and must be emancipated from, capitalism. The second half of Marx's essay, McLellan concludes, should be read as "an extended pun at Bauer’s expense.".
Hal Draper has argued that Marx was influenced by the writing of Jewish critic
Moses Hess, and that "On the Jewish Question" should be read alongside similar work by Hess:
» It is well known that the language of Marx’s Part II of On the Jewish Question followed the view of the Jews’ role given in an essay On the Money System just written by none other than Hess, and just read by Marx.
» A special case, near if not in the Young Hegelian tendency, was Moses Hess: conscientiously Jewish himself, Hess had been brought up in an orthodox household and later became the progenitor of Zionism. Hess’s thesis was that present-day society was a “huckster world”, a “social animal-world”, in which people become fully developed “egoists”, beasts of prey and bloodsuckers. “The Jews”, wrote the father of Zionism, “who in the natural history of the social animal-world had the world-historic mission of developing the beast of prey out of humanity have now finally completed their mission’s work.” It was in the “Judeo-Christian huckster world” that “the mystery of the blood of Christ, like the mystery of the ancient Jewish blood-worship, finally appears quite unmasked as the mystery of the beast of prey.” There is more verbiage, going back to the “blood-cult” of ancient Judaism as the prototype of modern society, and on to a condemnation of priests as the “hyenas of the social animal-world” who are as bad as the other animal-people by virtue of their “common quality as beasts of prey, as bloodsuckers, as Jews, as financial wolves”.
» Earlier in 1843 Hess had published an important article on The Philosophy of Action, which only incidentally remarked that “The Christian God is an imitation of the Jewish Moloch-Jehovah, to whom the first-born were sacrificed to ‘propitiate’ him, and whom the juste-milieu age of Jewry bought off with money ...” Hess intended no special anti-Jewish animus in any of this stuff, compared to which Marx’s approach is complimentary and drily economic. Note that Judaism is criticized as part of the Judeo-Christian complex, and not in order to praise Christianity – this being the same pattern as Voltaire’s; although Hess saw no contradiction between his own continued Jewish faith and loyalties and his opinion, expounded in his writings, that Christianity was the more advanced, modern and “pure” religion – all in the Feuerbachian groove.
Influences on Marx's thought
Marx's thought was strongly influenced by:
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 is inevitable. 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 are not fatalists, but activists who believe 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) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed
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). 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 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's the material world that's 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 didn't 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
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 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's 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 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's Marxism, then I'm not a Marxist" (in a letter to Engels, Marx later accused Guesde of being a "Bakuninist").
Essentially, people use the word "
Marxist" 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 to describe those who believe that a workers' revolution is 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
Social Democratic Party of Germany, 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 of 1917 in which a left splinter of the Second International, the
Bolsheviks, led by
Vladimir Lenin, took power. The revolution dynamized 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, and ignite revolution in the advanced industrial societies of Europe, where society is ready for socialism, and which could then come to the aid of the workers state in Russia.
Marx and Engels make a very significant comment in the preface to the Russian edition of the
Communist Manifesto:
In China
Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could 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. It was a departure from Marx, who had stated that the revolutionary transformation of society could take place only in countries that have achieved a capitalist stage of development with a proletarian majority. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as
Maoism.
Under Lenin, and particularly under
Joseph Stalin, Soviet suppression of the rights of individuals in the name of the struggle against capitalism, as well as
Stalinist purges themselves, came in the minds of many to be characteristic of Marxism. This impression was encouraged by capitalism-oriented western states, as well as the politics of the
Cold War. There were, nonetheless, always 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.
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, they'd 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.
In
Marx's 'Das Kapital' (2006), biographer
Francis Wheen reiterates
David McLellan's observation that since Marxism hadn't triumphed in the West, "it hadn't been turned into an official ideology and is thus the object of serious study unimpeded by government controls."
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,
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 since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably
Nepal.
Marx was ranked #27 on
Michael H. Hart's
list of the most influential figures in history.
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.
Criticisms
»
Economic
Many proponents of
capitalism have argued that capitalism is a more effective means of generating and redistributing wealth than socialism or communism, or that the gulf between rich and poor that concerned Marx and Engels was a temporary phenomenon. Some suggest that self-interest and the need to acquire capital is an inherent component of human behavior, and isn't caused by the adoption of capitalism or any other specific
economic system and that different economic systems reflect different social responses to this fact. The
Austrian School of economics has criticized Marx's use of the
labour theory of value. In addition, the political repression and economic problems of several historical
Communist states have done much to destroy Marx's reputation in the
Western world, particularly following the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Some Marxists argue that the former USSR was a variant of
state capitalism whose collapse doesn't affect the veracity of Marxism.
Friedrich Hayek provided a reply to Marx; in
The Road to Serfdom (1944) Hayek shows, or attempts to show, that coordination problems in a socialist economy (the prerequisite for the subsequent pure communism and "whithering away of the state"), whether that socialist economy was democratically controlled or under Leninist direction, would necessarily create bottlenecks as the quasi-labor of "planning" replaces production for use. Followers of Hayek point to the queues and shortages that result from planned rationing (whether in Communist societies or wartime democracies such as Britain from 1939 to 1951) to demonstrate that in the short run, the socialist or Leninist economy seizes up and creates unfairness.
Some argue that while
socioeconomic gaps between the
bourgeoisie and
proletariat remained, industrialization in countries such as the
United States and
Great Britain also saw the rise of a
middle class not inclined to revolution, and of a
welfare state that helped contain any revolutionary tendencies among the working class. While the economic devastation of the
Great Depression broadened the appeal of Marxism in the developed world, future government safeguards and economic recovery led to a decline in its influence. In contrast, Marxism remained extremely influential in
feudal and industrially underdeveloped societies such as Czarist
Russia, where the
Bolshevik Revolution was successful.
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Critics argue that the Soviet Union's numerous internal failings and subsequent collapse were a direct result of the practical failings of Marxism. Most Marxists on the contrary claim that it was precisely the abandonment of Marxism in the Soviet Union that led to its demise, due to its isolation in a backward country not ripe for socialism according to Marx. Marx saw more advanced modes of production as growing out of mature capitalism, and needing widespread education and democratic apparatuses to allow the eventual control of the state by the people themselves (and eventually, the "withering away of the state" under a truly mature communism) - only possible with a well educated and democratic populace. Marx didn't appear to suggest that a stage of economic development could simply be skipped over, as the Soviet ideology implied. Rather, no nation should realistically be able to achieve socialism (let alone a mature communism) until it had developed a modern capitalist system, and mature communism was supposed to require a level of wealth and technology that would allow the basic material needs of all citizens to be produced with very little labor, on average, per person in a given time period. That achievement would then free people's time and energies to fully participate in the democratic running of society, and then to finally overcome the alienation that the pattern of technological revolutions had caused throughout history—a giant arc in which societies developed from the "primitive communism" of small bands that had little or no structural inequality, through the great agrarian empires (usually involving slavery at one end and the richest monarchs at the other) which Marx considered to be the pinnacle of inequality, through feudalism and capitalism to the socialist organisation of society in which all can participate equally due to this technological development. The "elites" of feudal and capitalist society become less able to dominate others either through economics or ideology - their role in society is finished - as the working class develops its strength and becomes the "gravedigger" of capitalism.
Systematic
An intriguing critic of Marx, although he also paid tribute to many of Marx's basic ideas, was
Louis Feuer, the late professor of philosophy at
University of California, Berkeley. In his introduction to Selected Works on Economics and Politics by Karl Marx, published in 1960, Feuer argued strongly for the viewpoint, also expressed by others, that Marxism has many of the characteristics of a religion—in other words, that Marxism largely depends upon a fervent kind of faith, not provable scientifically, which is typical of religious believers. Just the same, Feuer in his introduction, and in other works, argued that Marx has had a very enduring and positive influence on the social and economic thinking of almost every modern country, particularly in Western Europe, but also in the United States. He made the interesting comment that Marxism largely depends upon the injection of ethical thinking into economic and political analysis—in contrast to modern trends which prefer to discuss these important areas in a totally "objective" manner without ethical values.
Still others criticize Marx from the perspective of philosophy of science.
Karl Popper has criticized Marx's theories for not being
falsifiable, which he believed rendered some aspects of Marx’s historical and socio-political argument unscientific; Popper's falsifiability standard, though very influential, has itself been controversial. Popper also criticized Marx for
historicism, that is, a relativization of truth to a particular historical period.
While Marx and Engels focused almost exclusively on developments in the West following the prospective development of capitalism, this left the problems of the less developed nations, such as Russia, largely unaddressed. This perceived problem with Marxist theory—that revolutions nevertheless took place in less developed areas of the world, even rather more than within the most advanced capitalist ones—was known from the beginning of the 20th century, and much of the work of
Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist and Marxian authors and theorists became dedicated to addressing it. Lenin's collected works contain dozens of examples of his insistence that the victory of socialism in Russia was dependent upon its spread to the heavily industrialized nations.
Trotsky famously developed the theory of
Permanent Revolution to show how revolutions in backward countries like Russia could succeed so long as they spread to the West. After Lenin's death, this was opposed by Stalin, who argued that it was possible to establish "socialism in one country." In essence, Lenin argued, taking the theory from several other contemporary Marxist writers, that through
imperialism the bourgeoisie of wealthy countries is using "superprofits" from the imperial colonies to effectively bribe the working class back home in order to appease it. Nevertheless, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Western capitalist nations did experience (unsuccessful) revolutions more or less along the "proletarian" lines that Marx envisaged, notably in
Germany (1918, 1919, 1923),
Hungary (1919),
Finland (1918), and Spain (leading to the
Spanish Civil War) with upheavals in
eastern China, France, Italy, and the UK (the
general strike of 1926) and elsewhere.
Others, like
Shlomo Avineri, have argued that it was the pre-capitalist structure of 1917 Russia, as well as the strong authoritarian traditions of the Russian state and its weak civil society, which pushed the Soviet revolution towards its repressive development.
Critics have also claimed to have shown problems with the concept of historical materialism. At the base of historical materialism, they claim, is the view that the mode of production creates all historical events and changes. But critics have asked the question `Where does the mode of production come from?'.
Murray Rothbard argues that "...Marx never attempts to provide an answer. Indeed he cannot, since if he attributes the state of technology or technological change to the actions of man, of individual men, his whole system falls apart. For human consciousness, and individual consciousness at that, would then be determining [themode of production] rather than the other way round." However, Marx's famous
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy states "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production."
(External Link) Marx clearly attributes the productive forces and their development to the actions of human beings, but emphasises the social nature of this development, based on necessity, the need to maintain their existence, which thus develops "independent of their will", as individuals, and thus impacts back on the individual in ways which reflect the given social conditions.
From the Left
Marx has also been criticized from the Left. Some have argued that class isn't the most fundamental inequality in history and call attention to
patriarchy or
race, as not being, as Marxists argue, dependent on class. It could however be argued that Marx doesn't suggest that class divisions are more fundamental than patriarchy, since the division between men and women, as Engels pointed out, predates class divisions, but only that the movement of history can be best understood in terms of class, and that class struggle is the mechanism of change.
Anarchists, on the other hand, have always opposed Marxism, even its most libertarian forms, as being too authoritarian, and missing the basic necessity of rebellion against authority by concentrating on economic matters. (See also
Anarchism and Marxism).
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 differences 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. Critics of this analysis retort that the top 1% of stock owners still own nearly 50% of the nation's publicly traded company stocks.
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