Karl Marx- works and ideas
Major Works: The Communist Manifesto (with Engels: Manifest der Kommunisten, 1848),
A Contribution to tile Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital (Das Kapital, 3 vols.:
1867, 1885, 1894)
Major Ideas:
· The whole of what is called world history is the creation of human labor.
· Capitalist development prevents human beings from reaching their full potential as
self-determining beings.
· Only when capitalists are overthrown, private properly is abolished, and communal
ownership of the means of production is established by an initial dictatorship of the
proletariat can economic justice be achieved.
The impact of Karl Marx's philosophy and theories of social development cannot be
overestimated. His ideas of human relationships and capitalist development have brought
about changes in the world during the past hundred years that will be felt for years and
perhaps centuries to come. Revolutions have been started with the goal of developing a state
utilizing Marx's ideas as the foundation. We have seen such revolutions in Europe, Asia,
Africa, and South America. Even where his ideas of social organization have ultimately been
rejected, the effects of his influence tend to be profound (as in the recent rebellions against
Soviet domination).
Karl Marx was born into a family that had recently converted from Judaism to
Protestantism. His father was a lawyer. At the age of seventeen, Karl attended the University
of Bonn to study law, but his behavior at the university (drinking, dueling and so forth) led
his father to withdraw him from Bonn and send him to the University of Berlin.
At the University of Berlin, Marx decided to major in philosophy, and he joined a group of
radical students and lecturers known as the "Young Hegelians," who maintained that religion
is nothing more than a human invention designed to explain the unexplainable. Marx's time
with the Young Hegelians was significant in his intellectual development.
Marx began to raise critical questions about the role of ideas: in the shaping of social
organizations and in social relationships. He became interested in using knowledge as a
means for emancipating the victims of society, and he argued for the unity of theory and
practice. As a result of his association with the Young Hegelians, he became editor of the
Rheinische Zeitung in 1842--a radical newspaper critical of the treatment of the
disadvantaged by both Prussia and Russia. In January 1843, the newspaper was shut down by
the government.
In April of 1843 Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, his childhood sweetheart. After
months of trying to obtain an academic position but being unable to do so, he and his wife
left for Paris, where they lived until 1845.
Paris was a gathering place for radicals and revolutionaries and was a center of political
activity. Marx met many radical socialists during this period, but of all the relationships he
developed during those years the most significant was his friendship with Friedrich Engels,
with whom he later wrote the Communist Manifesto. In 1844, Marx helped found an
influential radical journal (the German-French Annals) and began the writing of his
economic and political essays.
In response to his attacks on the Prussian aristocracy, the Prussian government on April 16,
1844, issued an order for Marx's arrest on the charge of high treason. The French
government then expelled him from Paris, and he moved to Brussels, where he lived in exile
for three years.
In 1847, the Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to write a document about
its aims and beliefs; the resultant document was the Communist Manifesto, published in
1848.
While in Brussels, Marx had helped to buy arms for an abortive workers' revolution and, as a
result, he was no longer welcome in Brussels. In 1849, he moved to London, where he
remained for the rest of his life.
In 1851, Marx became the London correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune
(although most of the articles were actually written by Engels). He remained with the paper
for approximately ten years. From 1864-72, he was involved in the International Working
Men's Association (the First Internationale). This group was not as radical as the Communist
League; although they supported workers' rights and attempted to organize workers in
England, France, Germany, and Poland, they did not advocate communism or violent
revolution.
The first volume of Das Kapital (Capital) was published in Germany on September 14, 1867.
The first translation appeared in Russia in 1872, and the English translation followed in
1887. Marx was working on Das Kapital for nearly twenty years but was unable to finish it
before his death. Engels brought out the second volume in 1885 and the third volume in
1895.
The basic premise of Marxism is that our perception of the material world is conditioned by
the society we live in. History is a process of the continuous creation, satisfaction, and
recreation of human needs. Fundamentally, the history of the world's societies has been a
history of the struggle for wealth and private property, and labor is the force of that struggle.
As human beings struggle with their environment in an attempt to satisfy their needs, they
are limited by the conditions of the societies in which they work: technology, ideology,
divisions of labor, and so forth. Therefore, human history is determined by the relationships
of labor to ownership.
In The German Ideology (written with Engels and published 1845-46), Marx discussed for
the first time in detail his understanding of human history and the development of
capitalism. According to Marx, the various stages of the division of labor can be categorized
as preclass systems, Asiatic societies, the ancient world, feudalism, and the origins of
capitalist development.
Preclass societies are characterized by communal ownership of property and a simple
division of labor (gender related). Nomadic groups tended to develop these types of
societies. The Asiatic societies were the earliest kind of class societies with powerful tyrants
as rulers. In what Marx calls the ancient societies, land became private property, large cities
were created, and a slave population came into being; there was a large gap between the rich
and the poor. The feudal societies developed in Europe with the downfall of the Roman
Empire: A large class of serfs worked the land for a small class of aristocrats. With the rise of
commercial trading cities such as Venice and Genoa, feudalism came to an end and
capitalism took its place. Capitalist societies are characterized by two major classes: the
bourgeoisie-those who control capital (wealth and the means of production)-and the
proletariat (the laborers who produce wealth and are used as means toward that end).
According to Marx, all of these societies except for the Asiatic follow each other in
sequence. The Asiatic societies can exist in the same time-frame as preclass and ancient
societies. All types of societies, however, are determined by the social regulation of labor. In
other words, the economic structure of society determines the legal and political
superstructure as well as the dominant social consciousness of the society, the laws, and the
dominant class. The prevailing ideology is the ideology of the ruling class, the owners of the
means of production. For Marx, the means of production include tools, machines, land, and
the technology needed to utilize them for productive purposes.
In a capitalistic system, the bourgeoisie, those who own the means of production, control
the economic and political structures of "their" society; the power to shape society lies in the
hands of the owners, and they maintain their position through a dominating ideology. The
interests of the capitalist are preeminent and tend to be in conflict with the interests of those
who comprise the remainder of society. The institution of private property is indispensable
to any capitalist ideology.
The proletariat (and the nonworkers) make up the remainder of society, and they suffer from
the domination of the capitalist owners. But until they become a self-conscious group and
overcome the factors of alienation and false consciousness brought about by the
manipulative techniques of the bourgeoisie, they cannot challenge and overcome the power
and ideology of the capitalists.
Alienation is the workers' state of being "other," resulting from domination by those whose
power comes from the workers; the workers, hence, are opposed by forces of their own
creation that confront them as alien forces. In capitalist societies, work is a means to an end
(the end being the wealth of the owners). According to Marx, work should be the end,
related to the interests of the workers. Alienation in work is fourfold: The workers are
alienated from (1) the products of their labors, (2) the forces of production (3) themselves,
and (4) the community.
The workers work for others and produce objects over which they have no control, objects
that they may or may not need For them, work becomes a mere job, undertaken in order to
acquire the wages by which material goods can be purchased. The goods that are bought by
the workers may be goods that they themselves have produced; hence, the workers are, in
effect, paying for their own labor with the money received for producing the goods they
purchase. Since workers do not own the means of production, they lose control over their
own ability to create through labor: They lose their freedom. Consequently, the workers,
through losing their freedom by being used as mere instruments, are dehumanized in the
process of being perpetually dominated by the owners of capital.
False consciousness is another factor acting as a barrier to the proletariat's move into a class
for itself. "False" consciousness is the contradiction between understanding and practice.
Workers in a capitalist society may believe themselves to be free, but in practice they are the
slaves of the dominating class, the owners. Workers who believe that social mobility is open-
-that by their labor they can change their class status--can accept class inequalities, but if in
practice they find that they cannot move from the working class to the class of owners, they
begin to question their understanding.
In the questioning of their understanding, the workers who have suffered from false
consciousness will begin to see how their interests as workers are similar and will move
toward organizing on the basis of those common interests. In the process of organizing, the
workers become a class for themselves, the "proletariat."
When the laboring class, the proletariat, emerges as a class conscious of its status and of the
causes of its oppression, it undertakes a struggle for control with the bourgeoisie. When the
bourgeoisie is overcome, through violent revolution if necessary, a new society emerges, one
that is classless and in which private property is abolished.
To understand Marx's conception of social change, one has to understand the concept--
derived by Marx from Hegel--of dialectical materialism. Hegel wrote of dialectical processes-
-opposing forces producing through conflict a resolution or synthesis: Through the conflict
of opposites, thesis and antithesis, a new order or synthesis emerges. In the case of opposing
social forces, Marx pointed out, a new social order emerges rooted in material conditions.
Before the classless society resulting from the abolition of private property and involving the
common ownership of the means of production can be attained, Marx argued, the proletariat
has to destroy all remnants of bourgeois society. A dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary
to ensure the orderly removal of the vestiges of bourgeois power. The duration of that
dictatorship varies according to the conditions in the society being transformed. Once the
state has succeeded in achieving a classless society, it withers away, since it is no longer
needed.
A major criticism of Marxism is directed to the notion of inevitability, the theory that class
differences must lead to conflict resulting in a new social order: Capitalism, because of its
inherent contradictions, must give way to socialism and communism. If the theory were true,
one would expect that revolutions culminating in communism would have occurred in the
United States and Great Britain rather than in Russia and China. Critics of Marxism suggest
that societal change is not evolutionary but situational: Change of the kind Marx envisaged is
not inevitable but may occur when circumstances both permit and encourage movements
leading to shifts in power.
Another major criticism of Marxism is directed toward Marx's theory of economic
determinism, the view that the dynamic relationships in a society are determined solely or
primarily by economic factors: Wealth, power, and prestige are affected primarily by
relationships to the means of production. This unidimensional approach, according to the
critics, does not adequately address such factors as race and gender. Accordingly, Marx
minimized the effects of racism and sexism by reducing them to economically determined
class relations.
Finally, critics of Marx contend that Marx's ideal of the classless society is unrealistic and
utopian. For one thing, the Communist states have so far not achieved their objective of
becoming classless societies and, consequently, they have not withered away as dictatorships;
on the contrary, either the dictatorial ruling classes have persisted, using violence and
intimidation to maintain power over the people, or they have themselves been displaced by
groups desiring a new social order. After all, it is pointed out by critics, all human societies
involve inequalities that persist; when one kind of imbalance is corrected, another takes its
place. In fact, to conceive a "society"--which necessarily involves the attempt to organize
classes of persons into an effective whole--as "classless" is itself a contradiction in terms.
Further Reading
Avineri, Shlomo. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1976. Avineri stresses the significance of Hegel's influence on
Marx.
Jordan, Z. A. The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism: A Philosophical and Sociological
Analysis. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977. A comprehensive study of the philosophy of
dialectical materialism. Jordan argues that dialectical materialism has never been a single,
continuous, or uniform doctrine. He suggests that Marxism is not a coherent body of
thought but a "wide and vaguely circumscribed collection of views, often incompatible with
each other."
Moore, Stanley. Marx on the Choice Between Socialism and Communism. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Moore carefully distinguishes between socialism and
communism, and discusses Marx's changing views on the transition to a Communist society.
Tucker, Robert. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972. One of the first books in English to reevaluate Marx in light of
Marx's own writings.
Weeks, John. Capital and Exploitation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. An
excellent discussion and analysis of Marxian economics.
Major Works: The Communist Manifesto (with Engels: Manifest der Kommunisten, 1848),
A Contribution to tile Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital (Das Kapital, 3 vols.:
1867, 1885, 1894)
Major Ideas:· The whole of what is called world history is the creation of human labor.
· Capitalist development prevents human beings from reaching their full potential as
self-determining beings.
· Only when capitalists are overthrown, private properly is abolished, and communal
ownership of the means of production is established by an initial dictatorship of the
proletariat can economic justice be achieved.
The impact of Karl Marx's philosophy and theories of social development cannot be
overestimated. His ideas of human relationships and capitalist development have brought
about changes in the world during the past hundred years that will be felt for years and
perhaps centuries to come. Revolutions have been started with the goal of developing a state
utilizing Marx's ideas as the foundation. We have seen such revolutions in Europe, Asia,
Africa, and South America. Even where his ideas of social organization have ultimately been
rejected, the effects of his influence tend to be profound (as in the recent rebellions against
Soviet domination).
Karl Marx was born into a family that had recently converted from Judaism to
Protestantism. His father was a lawyer. At the age of seventeen, Karl attended the University
of Bonn to study law, but his behavior at the university (drinking, dueling and so forth) led
his father to withdraw him from Bonn and send him to the University of Berlin.
At the University of Berlin, Marx decided to major in philosophy, and he joined a group of
radical students and lecturers known as the "Young Hegelians," who maintained that religion
is nothing more than a human invention designed to explain the unexplainable. Marx's time
with the Young Hegelians was significant in his intellectual development.
Marx began to raise critical questions about the role of ideas: in the shaping of social
organizations and in social relationships. He became interested in using knowledge as a
means for emancipating the victims of society, and he argued for the unity of theory and
practice. As a result of his association with the Young Hegelians, he became editor of the
Rheinische Zeitung in 1842--a radical newspaper critical of the treatment of the
disadvantaged by both Prussia and Russia. In January 1843, the newspaper was shut down by
the government.
In April of 1843 Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, his childhood sweetheart. After
months of trying to obtain an academic position but being unable to do so, he and his wife
left for Paris, where they lived until 1845.
Paris was a gathering place for radicals and revolutionaries and was a center of political
activity. Marx met many radical socialists during this period, but of all the relationships he
developed during those years the most significant was his friendship with Friedrich Engels,
with whom he later wrote the Communist Manifesto. In 1844, Marx helped found an
influential radical journal (the German-French Annals) and began the writing of his
economic and political essays.
In response to his attacks on the Prussian aristocracy, the Prussian government on April 16,
1844, issued an order for Marx's arrest on the charge of high treason. The French
government then expelled him from Paris, and he moved to Brussels, where he lived in exile
for three years.
In 1847, the Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to write a document about
its aims and beliefs; the resultant document was the Communist Manifesto, published in
1848.
While in Brussels, Marx had helped to buy arms for an abortive workers' revolution and, as a
result, he was no longer welcome in Brussels. In 1849, he moved to London, where he
remained for the rest of his life.
In 1851, Marx became the London correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune
(although most of the articles were actually written by Engels). He remained with the paper
for approximately ten years. From 1864-72, he was involved in the International Working
Men's Association (the First Internationale). This group was not as radical as the Communist
League; although they supported workers' rights and attempted to organize workers in
England, France, Germany, and Poland, they did not advocate communism or violent
revolution.
The first volume of Das Kapital (Capital) was published in Germany on September 14, 1867.
The first translation appeared in Russia in 1872, and the English translation followed in
1887. Marx was working on Das Kapital for nearly twenty years but was unable to finish it
before his death. Engels brought out the second volume in 1885 and the third volume in
1895.
The basic premise of Marxism is that our perception of the material world is conditioned by
the society we live in. History is a process of the continuous creation, satisfaction, and
recreation of human needs. Fundamentally, the history of the world's societies has been a
history of the struggle for wealth and private property, and labor is the force of that struggle.
As human beings struggle with their environment in an attempt to satisfy their needs, they
are limited by the conditions of the societies in which they work: technology, ideology,
divisions of labor, and so forth. Therefore, human history is determined by the relationships
of labor to ownership.
In The German Ideology (written with Engels and published 1845-46), Marx discussed for
the first time in detail his understanding of human history and the development of
capitalism. According to Marx, the various stages of the division of labor can be categorized
as preclass systems, Asiatic societies, the ancient world, feudalism, and the origins of
capitalist development.
Preclass societies are characterized by communal ownership of property and a simple
division of labor (gender related). Nomadic groups tended to develop these types of
societies. The Asiatic societies were the earliest kind of class societies with powerful tyrants
as rulers. In what Marx calls the ancient societies, land became private property, large cities
were created, and a slave population came into being; there was a large gap between the rich
and the poor. The feudal societies developed in Europe with the downfall of the Roman
Empire: A large class of serfs worked the land for a small class of aristocrats. With the rise of
commercial trading cities such as Venice and Genoa, feudalism came to an end and
capitalism took its place. Capitalist societies are characterized by two major classes: the
bourgeoisie-those who control capital (wealth and the means of production)-and the
proletariat (the laborers who produce wealth and are used as means toward that end).
According to Marx, all of these societies except for the Asiatic follow each other in
sequence. The Asiatic societies can exist in the same time-frame as preclass and ancient
societies. All types of societies, however, are determined by the social regulation of labor. In
other words, the economic structure of society determines the legal and political
superstructure as well as the dominant social consciousness of the society, the laws, and the
dominant class. The prevailing ideology is the ideology of the ruling class, the owners of the
means of production. For Marx, the means of production include tools, machines, land, and
the technology needed to utilize them for productive purposes.
In a capitalistic system, the bourgeoisie, those who own the means of production, control
the economic and political structures of "their" society; the power to shape society lies in the
hands of the owners, and they maintain their position through a dominating ideology. The
interests of the capitalist are preeminent and tend to be in conflict with the interests of those
who comprise the remainder of society. The institution of private property is indispensable
to any capitalist ideology.
The proletariat (and the nonworkers) make up the remainder of society, and they suffer from
the domination of the capitalist owners. But until they become a self-conscious group and
overcome the factors of alienation and false consciousness brought about by the
manipulative techniques of the bourgeoisie, they cannot challenge and overcome the power
and ideology of the capitalists.
Alienation is the workers' state of being "other," resulting from domination by those whose
power comes from the workers; the workers, hence, are opposed by forces of their own
creation that confront them as alien forces. In capitalist societies, work is a means to an end
(the end being the wealth of the owners). According to Marx, work should be the end,
related to the interests of the workers. Alienation in work is fourfold: The workers are
alienated from (1) the products of their labors, (2) the forces of production (3) themselves,
and (4) the community.
The workers work for others and produce objects over which they have no control, objects
that they may or may not need For them, work becomes a mere job, undertaken in order to
acquire the wages by which material goods can be purchased. The goods that are bought by
the workers may be goods that they themselves have produced; hence, the workers are, in
effect, paying for their own labor with the money received for producing the goods they
purchase. Since workers do not own the means of production, they lose control over their
own ability to create through labor: They lose their freedom. Consequently, the workers,
through losing their freedom by being used as mere instruments, are dehumanized in the
process of being perpetually dominated by the owners of capital.
False consciousness is another factor acting as a barrier to the proletariat's move into a class
for itself. "False" consciousness is the contradiction between understanding and practice.
Workers in a capitalist society may believe themselves to be free, but in practice they are the
slaves of the dominating class, the owners. Workers who believe that social mobility is open-
-that by their labor they can change their class status--can accept class inequalities, but if in
practice they find that they cannot move from the working class to the class of owners, they
begin to question their understanding.
In the questioning of their understanding, the workers who have suffered from false
consciousness will begin to see how their interests as workers are similar and will move
toward organizing on the basis of those common interests. In the process of organizing, the
workers become a class for themselves, the "proletariat."
When the laboring class, the proletariat, emerges as a class conscious of its status and of the
causes of its oppression, it undertakes a struggle for control with the bourgeoisie. When the
bourgeoisie is overcome, through violent revolution if necessary, a new society emerges, one
that is classless and in which private property is abolished.
To understand Marx's conception of social change, one has to understand the concept--
derived by Marx from Hegel--of dialectical materialism. Hegel wrote of dialectical processes-
-opposing forces producing through conflict a resolution or synthesis: Through the conflict
of opposites, thesis and antithesis, a new order or synthesis emerges. In the case of opposing
social forces, Marx pointed out, a new social order emerges rooted in material conditions.
Before the classless society resulting from the abolition of private property and involving the
common ownership of the means of production can be attained, Marx argued, the proletariat
has to destroy all remnants of bourgeois society. A dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary
to ensure the orderly removal of the vestiges of bourgeois power. The duration of that
dictatorship varies according to the conditions in the society being transformed. Once the
state has succeeded in achieving a classless society, it withers away, since it is no longer
needed.
A major criticism of Marxism is directed to the notion of inevitability, the theory that class
differences must lead to conflict resulting in a new social order: Capitalism, because of its
inherent contradictions, must give way to socialism and communism. If the theory were true,
one would expect that revolutions culminating in communism would have occurred in the
United States and Great Britain rather than in Russia and China. Critics of Marxism suggest
that societal change is not evolutionary but situational: Change of the kind Marx envisaged is
not inevitable but may occur when circumstances both permit and encourage movements
leading to shifts in power.
Another major criticism of Marxism is directed toward Marx's theory of economic
determinism, the view that the dynamic relationships in a society are determined solely or
primarily by economic factors: Wealth, power, and prestige are affected primarily by
relationships to the means of production. This unidimensional approach, according to the
critics, does not adequately address such factors as race and gender. Accordingly, Marx
minimized the effects of racism and sexism by reducing them to economically determined
class relations.
Finally, critics of Marx contend that Marx's ideal of the classless society is unrealistic and
utopian. For one thing, the Communist states have so far not achieved their objective of
becoming classless societies and, consequently, they have not withered away as dictatorships;
on the contrary, either the dictatorial ruling classes have persisted, using violence and
intimidation to maintain power over the people, or they have themselves been displaced by
groups desiring a new social order. After all, it is pointed out by critics, all human societies
involve inequalities that persist; when one kind of imbalance is corrected, another takes its
place. In fact, to conceive a "society"--which necessarily involves the attempt to organize
classes of persons into an effective whole--as "classless" is itself a contradiction in terms.
Further Reading
Avineri, Shlomo. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1976. Avineri stresses the significance of Hegel's influence on
Marx.
Jordan, Z. A. The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism: A Philosophical and Sociological
Analysis. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977. A comprehensive study of the philosophy of
dialectical materialism. Jordan argues that dialectical materialism has never been a single,
continuous, or uniform doctrine. He suggests that Marxism is not a coherent body of
thought but a "wide and vaguely circumscribed collection of views, often incompatible with
each other."
Moore, Stanley. Marx on the Choice Between Socialism and Communism. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Moore carefully distinguishes between socialism and
communism, and discusses Marx's changing views on the transition to a Communist society.
Tucker, Robert. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972. One of the first books in English to reevaluate Marx in light of
Marx's own writings.
Weeks, John. Capital and Exploitation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. An
excellent discussion and analysis of Marxian economics.
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