Karl (Heinrich) Marx

At the same time as 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.

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 Marxian 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. 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.

While Marx was supported financially by Engels, he nevertheless lived in poverty with his wife Jenny von Westphalen, their children and maid, Helene Demuth.

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.

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.

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. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms.

Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach.

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 thought

The legacy of Marx's thought is bitterly contested between numerous tendencies who claim to be Marx's most accurate interpreters, including Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and libertarian Marxism.

Marx's philosophy hinges on his view of human nature. Nevertheless, Marxist thought rests on the fundamental assumption that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour " and the capacity to transform nature labour power. 1)

Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual.

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. Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology).

Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. Marx and Engels accepted claims by some contemporary anthropologists that non-literate societies were not class-stratified) in terms of such conflicts:

Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour power. 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 the fact (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labour-power.

Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.

Political economy

Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. 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.

Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. 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. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production.

Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would in general be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without violence.

Main works

Das Kapital

Das Kapital (or Capital in English) is written over three volumes, of which only the first was complete at the time of Marx's death.

Grundrisse

Marx was involved in a huge ongoing work-in-progress, which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as Grundrisse. In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages that Hegel explicitly stated (often in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism.

Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; and sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the Ethnological Notebooks that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket, including that of Marxism itself (a famously telling anecdote is the one in which Marx quipped to Paul Lafargue "All that I know is that I'm not a Marxist").

Marx's influence

Marx and Engels' work covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. "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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

Bibliography and online texts

Biographies

Articles and entries