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Karl Marx

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Western Philosophy
19th century philosophy
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Name: Karl Marx
Birth: May 5, 1818 (Trier, Germany)
Death: March 14, 1883 (London, England)
School/tradition: Marxism
Main interests
Political philosophy, Social philosophy, Philosophy of economics, Politics, Economics, class struggle
Notable ideas
Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels), alienation and exploitation of the worker, historical materialism
Aristotle, Democritus, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Sismondi, Stirner, Smith, Ricardo, Rousseau, Goethe, Fourier, Spinoza |
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Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London, England) was an immensely influential philosopher , a political economist, and a socialist revolutionary. While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

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. Marx had broken with his university environment, German Idealism and the Young Hegelians, and took part in the debates of the European workers' movement, in particular in relation with the First International founded in 1864. He published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867, a few years before the 1871 Paris Commune. 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). 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 impact of Karl Marx (1818-83) upon the socialist movement has been unparalled. Marx was a brilliant scholar, economist, and philosopher. After studying law and philosophy in Prussia (now Germany), he became a journalist. His radical ideas led to successive exiles in Paris, Brussels, and finally London. There, Marx spent years reading, researching, and writing in the British Museum. With his close friend Friedrich Engels, he wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, followed by numerous other works, concluding with the three-volume Das Kapital, the last two volumes of which Engels wrote from Marx's rough notes and manuscripts. Although Marx did not invent socialism, he soon dominated the movement, and his theories came to be known as Marxism.

Influences on Marx's thought Edit

Main article: Influences on Karl Marx

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 was inevitable. This conception, shared by the young Marx (who formulated it in the Communist Manifesto but later abandoned it), however, did not entail fatalism. In the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (1845), Marx had famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it"; he thusly opposed praxis (the unity of theory and practice) to idealist interpretations which opposed themselves as various philosophical Weltanschauung. Marx thus cut with Prussian university in order to work with the labour movement in order to try to alter the world. Consequently, most followers of Marx have been activists who believed that revolutionaries must organize social change.


G.W.F. Hegel




Marx's thought Edit

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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 understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a materialist and claiming to be making a scientific analysis, Marx did not 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 a source of social disruption and conflict. Marx proposed to study history (he meant written history; Marx and Engels accepted claims by some contemporary anthropologists that non-literate societies were not class-stratified) in terms of such conflicts:






Political economyEdit





Main worksEdit

Das KapitalEdit

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. The first volume, and especially the first chapter of that volume, contains the core of the analysis and the critique of commodity fetishism. Hegel's legacy is especially overpowering here, and the work is seldom read with the thoroughness Marx urges in his introduction. According to his prescriptions, the method of presentation proceeds from the most abstract concepts, incorporating one new layer of determination at a time and tracing the effects of each such layer, in an effort to arrive eventually at a total account of the concrete relationships of everyday capitalist society.


Marx was involved in a huge ongoing work-in-progress, which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as "Grundrisse". These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marx-scholars. 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; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; 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 Edit

See also: Marxism

Statue of Marx and Engels in Alexanderplatz, Berlin.






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. This was termed by Mao as the New Democratic Revolution. 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. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism.

Under Lenin, and increasingly after the rise to power of Joseph Stalin, the actions of the Soviet Union (and later of the People's Republic of China) came in many people's mind to be synonymous with Marxism, with its attendant suppression of the rights of individuals and workers in the name of the struggle against capitalism, including the execution of large numbers of people under Stalin, a fact which has been used by anti-Communists against Marxism. However, there were throughout 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.


Statue of Marx and Engels in the Statue Park, Budapest.





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.

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, Somalia, the USSR and its republics, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In addition, the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal have had Marxist governments.


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.[1]

Marx was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history, and #3 on the German television show "Unsere Besten".


References Edit

  • Avineri, Shlomo, 1968. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge University Press.
  • Avineri, Shlomo, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (UK, Cambridge, 1968)
  • Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment.
  • Ronald Duncan, with Wilson, Colin, eds., 1987. Marx Refuted. Bath, UK ISBN 0-906798-71-X
  • Sterling Harwood, "Madisonian Democracy and Marxist Analysis: Ryder on the Constitution," in Christopher B. Gray, ed., Philosophical Reflections on the United States Constitution (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), pp. 29-36, reprinted in Sterling Harwood, ed., Business as Ethical and Business as Usual (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996), pp. 341-344.
  • Daniel Little, 1986. The Scientific Marx. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1505-5. Marx's work considered as science.
  • David McLellen, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
  • Jerry Z. Muller, 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. Anchor Books.
  • Maximilien Rubel, 1975. Marx without myth: A chronological study of his life and work. Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-15780-8
  • Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate (1999), ISBN 1-85702-637-3 (biography of Marx)

Notes Edit

  1. [1]

See also Edit

External links Edit

Bibliography and online texts Edit

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Articles and entries Edit

The works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels


Marx and Engels: The German Ideology (1845), The Holy Family (1845), Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Writings on the U.S. Civil War (1861), Capital, vol. 2 [posthumously, published by Engels] (1885), Capital, vol. 3 [posthumously, published by Engels] (1894)

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1844), The Peasant War in Germany (1850), Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1852), Anti-Dühring (1878), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Dialectics of Nature (1883), The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)



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