Karl Marx

Karl Marx.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) is generally thought of as the co-founder, with Friedrich Engels, of the political movement known as communism. He made historically significant contributions to the intellectual disciplines of philosophy, economics, politics and historicism. Of his many written contributions to those disciplines, the best-known is the 3-volume Das Kapital, and he was co-author, with Friedrich Engels, of the Communist Manifesto. Their slogan "workers of the world unite" became the rallying calls for revolutionary movements including Russia's Bolshevic Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949; and Marx's advocacy of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" has been the inspiration of communist parties throughout the world.

Overview

Karl Marx underwent a transition from academic theoretician to political activist - leaving an influential legacy in both fields. As a student of philosophy he accepted the tenets of traditional humanism, but he later developed his own interpretation in which religion is a response to hardship, and one that is destined to survive until its cause is removed. He sought an explanation for working class hardships in the theories of classical economics and developed his own analysis which concluded that capitalism deprives working people of the fruits of their labour. His analysis of historicism led him to the conclusion that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, and that its overthrow would happen first where the development of capitalism was most advanced. His political theories were concerned with the processes by which capitalism could be replaced by a system governed by the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". As a political activist, he played a major part in the promotion of communism, and was a founder member of the Communist League (later to become the Communist International). His intellectual legacy was globally influential despite the development of a consensus among academic economists that his economic analysis was flawed. His political proposals were taken up and developed by Lenin and others, and were the inspiration of Russia's Bolshevic Revolution and of communist revolutions in China, Cuba and elsewhere.

Life and works

Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a middle-class home in the Rhineland city of Trier, in Germany. He came, on both sides of his family, from a long line of Jewish rabbis, but his family converted to Lutheranism in 1824. Marx received a classical education and at the age of 17 he spent a year in the University of Bonn's law faculty. At age 18 he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen (1814-1881), daughter of Baron von Westphalen, a prominent member of Trier society. In 1836 Marx transferred to the University of Berlin and came under the influence of the philosophy of G.W.F Hegel which then dominated the movement known as German Idealism. After completing his doctoral thesis (which dealt with the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus), he turned to journalism and began writing for the Rheinische Zeitung, an opposition daily backed by liberal Rhenish industrialists. He soon became its editor, but the paper was closed by the authorities in May 1843 and he moved to Paris. Married to Jenny von Westphalen, he recorded his departure from Hegel's thesis in his "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right", in which he refers to religion as "the opium of the people". In Paris he developed what was to be a life-long association with his schoolfriend Friedrich Engels, and set out his thoughts about communism in what are now known as "the Paris manuscripts". Expelled from France, he moved to Brussels and recorded his developing philosophical thoughts in his "Theses on Feuerbach". Expelled from France he moved to Brussels and recorded his developing philosophical views in his "Theses on Feuerbach". Returning to France on the news of the (unsuccessful) revolution of 1848, he began work on a series of pamphlets on "the class struggles in France" and in 1848, he and Friedrich Engels published the "Communist Manifesto". After moving to London in 1849 he devoted years of endeavour to his major work: "Das Kapital". Throughout the latter years of his life until his death in 1883, he was an active supporter of the Communist League, that was later to become the Communist International.

(CC) Photo: Jennifer Boyer
Grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, London

Theoretical contributions

Politics

Marx's view of Civil society

Hungarian scholar László Tüto has argued that Marx believed that the bourgeois revolutions meant the worldwide historical liberation of the individual from the hierarchies of traditional societies. However, this liberation carried its own price. On the one hand, civil society and the state separated from each other in the bourgeois system, and as a result the individual became intrinsically split into a private person and a citizen of a state, two forms of existence that became opposed to each other. On the other hand, the economic freedom of private persons as members of civil society could only survive in the service of the spontaneous mechanisms of the market, that is, if people made themselves the tools of the tangible powers of the economy: goods, money, and capital. After the decline of freely competitive capitalism (into monopoly capitalism) this economic freedom was pushed into the background because of the property hierarchies. Freely competitive capitalism was characterized by the basic tendency of revolutionizing the means of production, and Marx concluded that the continuation of this tendency could only be ensured by going beyond the capitalist system to a socialist environment for civil society.

Marx's view of Russia

Initially, Marx's attitudes were marked by Russophobia, pronounced anti-Pan-Slavism, and assessments of Russia as an outpost of European reaction and counterrevolution, and even as the head of a conspiracy to block the world revolution. With time, however, Marx came to consider Russia as the country in which the outbreak of the revolution was most likely. In his research for successive volumes of Capital, he read Russian theoretical works by, among others, Vasili Bervi-Flerovski and A. I. Koshelev. Marx's attitudes to the anticipated peasant revolution in Russia remained ambivalent; to a certain degree he feared its occurrence, suspecting that it could take on an "Asiatic" hue.