BIOGRAPHY OF KARL MARX

BIOGRAPHY OF KARL MARX
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5th, 1818 in the city of Trier, Germany to a comfortable middle-class, Jewish family. His father, a lawyer and ardent supporter of Enlightenment liberalism, converted to Lutheranism when Marx was only a boy in order to save the family from the discrimination that Prussian Jews endured at the time. Marx enjoyed a broad, secular education under his father, and found an intellectual mentor in Freiherr Ludwig von Westphalen, a Prussian nobleman with whom Marx discussed the great literary and philosophical figures of his day. Notably, it was Westphalen who introduced the young Marx to the ideas of the early French socialist Saint-Simon. As a student in Bonn and Berlin, Marx was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Hegel. While Marx was impressed with the Hegelian professors under whom he studied, he ultimately found himself attracted to a group of students known as the "Young Hegelians." This group of young iconoclasts, including David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner, were inspired by Hegel but were determined to champion the more radical aspects of the old master's system. In particular, these Left Hegelians called into question the conservatism they saw in Hegel's avowed political and religious philosophies. Although Marx desired a career as an academic at the time, his political sympathies prevented him from receiving an position in the state-controlled university system. Instead, Marx turned to journalism where his radical politics attracted the attention of Prussian censors. The publication for which he worked was shut down for its politically incorrect commentary, and the frustrated Marx traveled to Paris. Paris in 1843 was an international center of social, political, and artistic activity and the gathering place of radicals and revolutionaries from all over Europe. In Paris Marx became involved with socialists and revolutionaries such as Proudhon and Bakunin. Most significantly, though, it was in Paris that Marx met Friedrich Engels, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer in England who had become a socialist after observing the deplorable condition of workers in his father's factories. Together, Marx and Engels began to develop the ideas which became Revoultionary Proletarian Socialism, or, as it is better known, Communism. Eventually, Marx was exiled from France in 1845 at the behest of the Prussian government for antiroyalist writings. After leaving Paris, Marx traveled to Belgium where he became involved with a group of artisans calling themselves the Communist League. In 1847 the Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to pen a statement of their beliefs and aims. This statement became the Communist Manifesto, which Marx zealously composed in anticipation the revolutions of 1848. When revolution did begin in Germany in 1848, Marx traveled to the Rhineland to encourage its progress. When the revolution failed, Marx returned to Paris but soon left for London where he would remain for the rest of his life. Marx waited in London for the fires of revolution to ignite again. In preparation for this, he spent his time in correspondence with revolutionary leaders on the Continent, ignoring the English Chartists and Trade Unionists whom he thought simpleminded and ineffectual. Eventually, Marx realized that the revolution was not imminent, and he withdrew from his associations, burying himself in the British Museum to research the history of class conflict. The fruit of this research was Marx's great Das Kapital, the first volume of which was published in 1867. Things began to turn around for Marx in 1863 when French workers traveled to England in order to establish a federation of working men pledged to overthrow the economic status quo. Although Marx disagreed with many of the ideological factions in the group, he recognized the significance of this event and left his self-imposed exile to join them. Marx successfully insinuated himself into the leadership of the group, now known as the International, and delivered his famous Inaugural Address to the First International as a triumphant proclamation of his principles. At last Marx had what he had desired since 1847; he had provided the intellectual foundation for a socialist movement over which he exercised full organizational control Marx's satisfaction soon ended, however, as the Paris Commune of 1871, the first true instance of workers achieving power for themselves, turned into a bloody disaster. The more pacifistic English workers became frightened and the French movement fell to infighting. The anarchist supporters of Bakunin tried to wrest control of the International from Marx, and the struggle between Marx and the anarchists finally lead to the dissolution of the group in 1876. In the few remaining years of his life, Marx wrote almost no significant works. His stature as the former leader of the International, though, did make him a sought after resource for new revolutionary groups throughout Europe and, in particular, in Russia. Although Marx helped these new leaders as he could, he did not take on any leadership roles in any movement again. Marx died in London in 1883, still awaiting the inevitable revolution which he had predicted.
About the Communist Manifesto In 1846 Karl Marx was exiled from Paris on account of his radical politics. He moved to Belgium where he attempted to assemble a ragtag group of exiled German artisans into an unified political organization, the German Working Men's Association. Marx, aware of the presence of similar organizations in England, called these groups together for a meeting in the winter of 1847. Under Marx's influence this assemblage of working-class parties took the name "The Communist League," discussing their grievances with capitalism and potential methods of response. While most of the delegates to this conference advocated universal brotherhood as a solution to their economic problems, Marx preached the fiery rhetoric of class warfare, explaining to the mesmerized workers that revolution was not only the sole answer to their difficulties but was indeed inevitable. The League, completely taken with Marx, commissioned him to write a statement of their collective principles, a statement which became The Communist Manifesto. After the conference, Marx returned to Brussels, carrying with him a declaration of socialism penned by two delegates, the lone copy of The Communist Journal, the publication of the London branch of the Communist League, and a statement of principles written by Engels. Although Marx followed Engel's principles very closely, the Manifesto is entirely of his own hand. Marx wrote furiously, but just barely made the deadline the League had set for him. The Manifesto was published in February 1848 and quickly published so as to fan the flames of revolution which smoldered on the Continent. When revolution broke out in Germany in March 1848, Marx traveled to the Rhineland to put his theory into practice. When this revolution was suppressed, Marx fled to London and the Communist League disbanded, the Manifesto its only legacy to the world. The Manifesto has lived a long and illustrious life. While it was hardly noticed amongst the crowded field of pamphlets and treatises published in 1848, it has had a more profound effect on the intellectual and political history of the world than any single work in the past 150 years. It has inspired the communist political systems which ruled nearly half the world's population at its height and defined the chief ideological conflict of the second half of the twentieth century, altering even those countries which stood firmly against communism, e.g. Western European and American Welfare States. Intellectually, Marx's work has profoundly influenced nearly every field of study from the humanities to the social sciences to the natural sciences. It is hard to imagine an area of serious human inquiry which Marxism has not touched. But even in the enormous body of work related to Marxism, The Manifesto is undoubtedly unique. Even at its short length (only 23 pages at its first printing), it is the only full exposition of his program that Marx wrote. And while Marx developed his views throughout his career, he never departed far from the original principles outlined therein. The Manifesto is, without a doubt, Marx's most enduring literary legacy, setting in motion a movement which has, although not in exactly the way Marx predicted, radically changed the world. As Marx famously asserted in his Theses on Feuerbach, "The philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways. What matters is changing it." No one has epitomized this as much as he.
INTELECTUAL INFLUENCES AND CORE IDEAS
Influences on Karl Marx are generally thought to have been derived from three sources: German idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English and Scottish political economy.
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German philosophy
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant is believed to have had the greatest influence of any philosopher of modern times. Kantian philosophy was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built - particularly as it was developed by Hegel. Hegel's dialectical method, which was taken up by Karl Marx, was an extension of the method of reasoning by “antinomies” that Kant used.
G. W. F. Hegel
G. W. F. Hegel, by the time of his death, was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. His views were widely taught, and his students were highly regarded. His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. Theologically and politically the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. They emphasized the compatibility between Hegel's philosophy and Christianity. Politically, they were orthodox. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Engels, and Marx. They were often referred to as the Young Hegelians.
Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism, is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed slavery in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their civilization.
While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
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. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the socialsuperstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism, and by the prediction of the development of socialism fromcapitalism.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Feuerbach was a German philosopher and anthropologist. Feuerbach proposed that people should interpret social and political thought as their foundation and their material needs. He held that an individual is the product of their environment, that the whole consciousness of a person is the result of the interaction of sensory organs and the external world. Marx (and Engels) saw in Feuerbach's emphasis on people and human needs a movement toward a materialistic interpretation of society.
In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. However he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.
What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in The German Ideology (1846):
In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
Also, in his Theses on Feuerbach (1844), he writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it". This opposition between, firstly, various subjective interpretations given by philosophers, which may be, in a sense, compared with Weltanschauung designed to legitimize the current state of affairs, and, secondly, the effective transformation of the world through praxis, which combines theory and practice in a materialist way, is what distinguishes "Marxist philosophers" from the rest of philosophers. Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy; Louis Althusser, founder of "Structural Marxism" in the 1960s, would define it as "class struggle in theory". Marx's movement away from university philosophy and towards the workers' movement is thus inextricably linked to his rupture with his earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators to speak of a "young Marx" and a "mature Marx", although the nature of this cut poses problems. A year before the Revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels thus wrote The Communist Manifesto, which was prepared to an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!". However, Marx's thought changed again following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's December 2, 1851 coup, which put an end to the French Second Republic and created the Second Empire which would last until the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and would latter arrive to his theory of commodity fetishism, exposed in the first chapter of the first book of Das Kapital (1867). This abandonment of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed, several Marxist theorists, including Marxist humanists such as the Praxis School, would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the "epistemological break" between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society.
The rupture with German Idealism and the Young Hegelians
Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer, a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. From 1841, the young Marx progressively broke away from German idealism and the Young Hegelians. Along with Engels, who observed theChartist movement in the United Kingdom, he cut away with the environment in which he grew up and encountered the proletariat in France and Germany.
He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family" (1845), and The German Ideology (1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (1844), considered as one of the founding book of individualist anarchism. Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently alienating, and that replacing God by the Humanity, as did Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the Nation, or even the Revolution alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized Proudhon, who had become famous with his cry "Property is theft!", in The Poverty of Philosophy (1845).
Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of Feuerbach. His theory of alienation, developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844(published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the "human nature"). But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had point out, and explained that the alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man (menschliche Wesen, human nature). But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual subject, as did classic philosophy, including contractualism (Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau) but also political economy, Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and all which constitute our human existence. He claimed that individualism was an essence the result of commodity fetishism or alienation. Although some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism which destroyed the possibility of free will, Marx's philosophy in no way can be reduced to such determinism, as his own personal trajectory makes clear.
In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study ofpolitical economy. He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy.
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English and Scottish political economy

Political economy predates the 20th century division of the two disciplines of politics and economics, treating social relations and economic relations as interwoven. Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists.
Adam Smith and David Ricardo
From Adam Smith came the idea that the grounds of property is labour.
Marx critiqued Smith and Ricardo for not realizing that their economic concepts reflected specifically capitalist institutions, not innate natural properties of human society, and could not be applied unchanged to all societies. He proposed a systematic correlation between labour-values and money prices. He claimed that the source of profits under capitalism is value added by workers not paid out in wages. This mechanism operated through the distinction between "labour power", which workers freely exchanged for their wages, and "labour", over which asset-holding capitalists thereby gained control.
This practical and theoretical distinction was Marx's primary insight, and allowed him to develop the concept of "surplus value", which distinguished his works from that of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Workers create enough value during a short period of the working day to pay their wages for that day (necessary labour); however, they continue to work for several more hours and continue to create value (surplus labour). This value is not returned to them but appropriated by the capitalists. Thus, it is not the capitalist ruling class that creates wealth, but the workers, the capitalists then appropriating this wealth to themselves. (Some of Marx's insights were seen in a rudimentary form by the "Ricardian socialist" school. He developed this theory of exploitation in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a "dialectical" investigation into the forms value relations take.
Marx's theory of business cycles; of economic growth and development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of profit, or crisis theory, are other important elements of Marx's political economy. Marx later made tentative movements towards econometric investigations of his ideas, but the necessarystatistical techniques of national accounting only emerged in the following century. In any case, it has proved difficult to adapt Marx's economic concepts, which refer to social relations, to measurable aggregated stocks and flows. In recent decades, however, a loose "quantitative" school of Marxist economists has emerged. While it may be impossible to find exact measures of Marx's variables from price data, approximations of basic trends are possible.
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French socialism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property, and therefore is sometimes considered a forebear of modernsocialism and communism, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings. He argued that the goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, regardless of the will of the majority. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau came the idea of egalitarian democracy.
Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon
In 1833 France was experiencing a number of social problems arising out of the Industrial Revolution. A number of sweeping plans of reform were developed by thinkers on the left. Among the more grandiose were the plans of Charles Fourier and the followers of Saint-Simon. Fourier wanted to replace modern cities with utopian communities, while the Saint-Simonians advocated directing the economy by manipulating credit. Although these programs didn’t have much support, they did expand the political and social imagination of their contemporaries, including Marx.
Louis Blanc
Louis Blanc is perhaps best known for originating the social principle, later adopted by Marx, of how labor and income should be distributed: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon participated in the February 1848 uprising and the composition of what he termed "the first republican proclamation" of the new republic. But he had misgivings about the new government because it was pursuing political reform at the expense of the socio-economic reform, which Proudhon considered basic. Proudhon published his own perspective for reform, Solution du problème social, in which he laid out a program of mutual financial cooperation among workers. He believed this would transfer control of economic relations from capitalists and financiers to workers. It was Proudhon's book What is Property? that convinced the young Karl Marx that private property should be abolished.
In one of his first works, The Holy Family, Marx said, "Not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat." Marx, however, disagreed with Proudhon's anarchism and later published vicious criticisms of Proudhon. Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy as a refutation of Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty. In his socialism, Proudhon was followed byMikhail Bakunin. After Bakunin's death, his libertarian socialism diverged into anarchist communism and collectivist anarchism, with notable proponents such asPeter Kropotkin and Joseph Déjacque.
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Other influences
Engels
Marx's revision of Hegelianism was also influenced by 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. Thereafter Engels and Marx worked together for the rest of Marx's life, so that the collected works of Marx and Engels are generally published together, almost as if the output of one person. Important publications, such as the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, were joint efforts. Engels says "I cannot deny that both before and during my 40 years' collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundation of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration." But he adds
But the greater part of its leading basic principles, especially in the realm of economics and history, and, above all, their final trenchant formulation, belong to Marx. What I contributed — at any rate with the exception of my work in a few special fields — Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved. Marx stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name.(Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy Part 4: Marx)
Antique materialism
Marx was influenced by Antique materialism, especially Epicurus (to whom Marx dedicated his thesis, ‘’Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus’’, 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty.
Lewis Morgan
Marx drew on Lewis H. Morgan and his social evolution theory. He wrote a collection of notebooks from his reading of Lewis Morgan but they are regarded as being quite obscure and only available in scholarly editions.
Charles Darwin
Marx read Darwin's The Origin of Species and recognized its value in supporting his theory of class struggle. He sent Darwin a personally inscribed copy of Das Kapital in 1873 and had a dedication in the German version: "In deep appreciation - for Charles Darwin".
Marx understood that Darwin's work both helped to explain the internal struggles of human society, and provided a material explanation for the processes of nature. In 1861, Karl Marx wrote to his friend Ferdinand Lassalle, "Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. ... Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained."
Having read Darwin's work and mentioned Darwin by name in Das Kapital , it is presumable that Marx may have been influenced to some degree by Darwin.
On Darwin's Influence
There is no mention of Darwin or evolution in The Communist Manifesto—not surprising, since Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, 11 years later—and the only reference to Darwin in Das Kapital amounts to short footnotes on technological specialization in manufacturing and industry.
In The Disasters Darwinism Brought to Humanity, Harun Yahya (a Muslim creationist) writes: "Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, adapted Darwin's ideas, which deeply influenced him, to the dialectic process of history." Yahya also writes: "Marx revealed his sympathy for Darwin by dedicating his most important work, Das Kapital, to him."
This last bit is a common misconception that arose from a letter from Darwin to Edward Aveling (who later became the lover of Marx's daughter, Eleanor). Aveling had written to Darwin about wanting to dedicate his book to him, but Darwin declined and Darwin's response became mixed with Karl Marx's papers when Eleanor Marx inherited her father's papers from Engels. The letter was published in 1931 in the Russian Communist magazine, Under the Banner of Marxism, which went on to suggest that the enclosures referred to in the letter might have been chapters from Das Kapital that dealt with evolution. It was not until 1975 that Aveling's letter to Darwin was discovered, debunking this myth.
Summary of Karl Marx's Ideas
German philosopher Karl Marx is considered to one of the most influential thinkers of all time. Marx wrote in the 19th century, a time of tremendous upheaval in the social and political fabric of Europe. Marx wrote at a time during which the excesses of the new Industrial Revolution were most prominent, and his ideas revolutionized thinking about capitalism and its relation to business, individuals, states and the environment.
Materialism
* The motivating idea behind Marx's philosophy was the idea of materialism. Materialists believe that it is the material conditions of the world, for instance, the structure of the economy and the distribution of wealth, that give rise to ideas such as who "should" lead and "deserves" to earn what they earn. This idea is contrary to idealism, which states that it is ideas that give rise to material reality.
Exploitation
* Marx believed that the real danger of capitalism was that it exploited workers. Marxists have since developed his theory to explore how capitalism also exploits the planet and its natural resources. According to Marx, capitalists exploit laborers by paying them less than they are worth -- the excess labor of the laborer is what becomes the capitalists' profits. This "surplus labor" is exploited by the capitalist who also forces the laborer into unfitting and unfair working conditions -- something that was much more obvious and severe during the 19th century Marx was writing.
Alienation
* Marx believed that workers were alienated in several ways. Marx highlighted four elements from which the worker is alienated: the product, the act of producing, himself and others. The main idea behind alienation is that one of the effects of the worker's exploitation by the capitalist is that he is not able to live as he otherwise naturally would. This alienation is a kind of separation or removal from how life "naturally" should be. Capitalism, for Marx, is a perversion that separates man from what he makes and how he makes it as well as he would otherwise "naturally" be as a human and how he would relate to others.
Revolution
* Marx believed that, eventually, workers would unite and overthrow the capitalist ruling class. He thought that the bourgeois-capitalist ruling structure would give way to a revolution led by workers who would replace the order with a more fair system. Marx did not exactly call this "communism," and the "communist" states that emerged after Marx -- the Soviet Union, North Korea, the People's Republic of China -- in no way resembled what Marx was talking about. Marx sought a radically democratic order based on collective decision-making and the shared used of the means of production -- that is, the land, labor, and capital that goes in to producing things.
MARX THEORITICAL ORIENTATION
Communist. His primary failing was in believing that labor had inherent value and that you should be paid for the effort you put into it. This creates the bizarre circumstance where a hard working low skilled laborer should be paid more than a lazy high skilled laborer when the hard working low skilled worker produces 1 object per hour and the lazy high skilled produces 5 objects per hour (although could produce 10 per hour if it were not for the laziness). Since an employer can sell five times as much output with the lazy worker the lazy worker should make 5 times as much. Marx felt the value of the object was in the labor effort to produce it. His other failing was to misunderstand the distinction between voluntary communal life, like monks live and imposed communal life, which is what communism is. Voluntary communal life is highly productive, forced communal life (like prisons) is very unproductive.
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY The German Ideology (German: Die Deutsche Ideologie) is a book written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher. However, the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.
The multi-part book consists of many satirically written polemics against Bruno Bauer, other Young Hegelians, and Max Stirner'sThe Ego and Its Own (1844). Part I, however, is a work of exposition giving the appearance of being the work for which the "Theses on Feuerbach" served as an outline. The work is a restatement of the theory of history Marx was beginning to call the "materialist conception of history".
Since its first publication, Marxist scholars have found the work particularly valuable since it is perhaps the most comprehensive statement of Marx's theory of history stated at such length and detail.
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The text
The text itself was written by Marx and Engels in Brussels in 1845 and 1846 but it was not published until 1932. The Preface and some of the alterations and additions are in Marx's hand; the bulk of the manuscript, however, is in Engels' hand, except for Chapter V of Volume II and some passages of Chapter III of Volume I which are in Joseph Weydemeyer's hand. Chapter V in Volume II was written by Moses Hess and edited by Marx and Engels. The text in German runs to around 700 pages.
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General outline
Marx and Engels argue that men distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence; what individuals are coincides with their production in both how and what they produce. The nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.
How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Also, there is a direct link between division of labour and forms of ownership.
The ruling class, in ruling the material force of society, is simultaneously the ruling intellectual force of society. They regulate the production and distribution of ideas of their age. As the ruling class changes with time, so too do the ideals and the new ruling class must instill upon its society its own ideas which will become universal. This system will forever remain in place so long as society is organized around the need for a ruling class.
To illustrate this theoretical framework, Marx draws on his formulation of base and superstructure. Historical development is the reflection of changes in the economic and material relations of the base. When the base changes, a revolutionary class becomes the new ruling class that forms the superstructure. During revolution, the revolutionary class makes certain that its ideas appeal to humanity in general so that after a successful revolution these ideas appear natural and universal. These ideas, which the superstructural elements of society propagate, then become the governing ideology of the historical period. Furthermore, the governing ideology mystifies the economic relations of society and therefore places the proletariat in a state of false consciousness that serves to reproduce the working class.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness no longer retain the semblance of independence; they have no history and no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the product of their collective thinking.
This approach allows us to cease understanding history as a collection of dead facts or an imagined activity of subjects.