Karl Marx

Introduction

Karl Marx is the German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, and political theorist whose work produced one of the most consequential intellectual frameworks of the modern era. The combination of philosophical analysis (drawn substantially from Hegel and the Young Hegelian tradition), economic theory (drawn from the British classical political economists, especially Smith and Ricardo), and revolutionary political activism (carried out through journalism, the First International, and decades of organizing) is what made Marx Marx. Each component alone would have been substantial; the integration is what made the work transformative.

The term Marxism names a tradition of thought and political practice that Marx himself disclaimed (the famous if anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist); the tradition that has gone under his name has spanned political revolutions, academic disciplines, and modes of cultural analysis far beyond what he could have anticipated. The relation between Marx's own thought and the various Marxisms that have descended from it is one of the major interpretive problems of the past century and a half.

Life

Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, to a family of Jewish background that had converted to Lutheranism to allow his father to continue practicing law. He studied at Bonn and then Berlin (1836–1841), where he engaged with the Young Hegelian movement around Bruno Bauer and the Doktorklub. He completed a doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus at Jena in 1841.

Unable to obtain a university position (his Young Hegelian associations were politically problematic), Marx turned to radical journalism, editing the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne until its suppression in 1843. He moved to Paris (1843–1845), where he met Friedrich Engels, the lifelong collaborator and intellectual companion. Expelled from Paris under Prussian pressure, he relocated to Brussels (1845–1848), then briefly returned to Germany during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 (when he and Engels published the Communist Manifesto), and finally settled in London in 1849, where he remained until his death in 1883.

The London years were Marx's most productive scholarly period and his most personally difficult. He worked in the British Museum Reading Room on the research that would become Capital (the first volume appeared in 1867; volumes II and III were left in draft and edited posthumously by Engels). He supported himself through journalism (especially the New York Tribune correspondence) and through Engels's continuing financial support; his domestic life was marked by extreme poverty, the deaths of several children, and chronic illness. He died in 1883 at age sixty-four, two years after the death of his wife Jenny.

The problem he worked on

Marx's intellectual project, across multiple disciplines, was the demonstration that human history has a discernible structure and direction, and that the structure is driven by material conditions of production rather than by ideas, ideals, or individual decisions. The framework, eventually called historical materialism, holds that the mode of production characteristic of a given period (the technology, the social relations of production, the distribution of property) shapes the political, legal, religious, and intellectual superstructure of that period; the contradictions within the mode of production drive historical change; capitalism, as the latest mode of production, has its own characteristic contradictions that will eventually produce its supersession.

The specific theoretical project of the mature work, especially Capital, was the systematic analysis of capitalism: its structure, its dynamics, its tendencies, its internal contradictions. The project was both descriptive (showing how capitalism actually works) and predictive (showing where its contradictions tend); the methodological framework drew on Hegelian dialectic transposed to material conditions.

The political project, never separable from the theoretical, was the support of working-class revolutionary movements aiming at the supersession of capitalism. Marx's continuous involvement in the International Workingmen's Association (the First International, 1864–1876) was part of the same project as his theoretical work.

Contributions

Historical materialism

The theoretical framework Marx and Engels developed across the 1840s and refined through Marx's life. The mode of production characteristic of a given society (the way humans produce the material conditions of their existence) is the foundation on which everything else is built. Religion, law, politics, philosophy, art are the superstructure arising from this material base; they reflect and serve the dominant economic interests of the period, though not in any simple or one-to-one way.

Historical change is driven by contradictions within the mode of production, especially between the forces of production (technology, productive capacity) and the relations of production (the social arrangements of property and labor). When the relations of production cease to accommodate the developing forces, social revolution becomes necessary and possible. The classical Marxist sequence of modes of production (primitive communism, ancient slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism) has been substantially complicated by later Marxist scholarship, but the framework of historical materialism remains foundational.

The analysis of capitalism

Marx's most extensive theoretical work, especially in Capital (Volume I, 1867; Volumes II and III published posthumously). The analysis proceeds from the commodity (the elementary form of bourgeois wealth) through the labor theory of value (commodities have value in proportion to the socially necessary labor required to produce them), through the analysis of surplus value (the difference between the value workers produce and what they receive in wages, appropriated by capital), through the analysis of capital accumulation, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the cyclical crises of overproduction, and the broader dynamics of capitalist development.

The analysis is both technical economics (engaging directly with Smith, Ricardo, and other classical political economists) and philosophical critique (exposing the social relations concealed by the apparent naturalness of market exchange). The famous concept of commodity fetishism (Capital I.1.4) names the way social relations between humans take on the appearance of relations between things — the way the products of human labor seem to have value independent of the labor that produced them.

Alienation

Marx's early concept (developed most extensively in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, unpublished in Marx's lifetime). Workers under capitalism are alienated in four ways: from the product of their labor (which belongs to capital, not the worker); from the activity of labor itself (which is experienced as compulsion rather than self-expression); from their species-being (the distinctive human capacity for free, conscious productive activity); and from other workers (whose relations are reduced to economic competition).

The concept of alienation organizes much of the early Marx and has been central to twentieth-century reception, especially since the 1844 Manuscripts were first published in 1932. The relation between the early humanistic Marx of alienation and the mature scientific Marx of Capital has been one of the major interpretive disputes within the Marxist tradition (Louis Althusser's For Marx, 1965, argues for an epistemological break between the two; most contemporary scholarship treats the relation as more continuous).

Ideology

Marx's analysis of ideology — the systematic distortion of social reality that arises from the material interests of dominant classes — has been one of the most influential single contributions of his work. Ideology is not simply false belief; it is belief whose function is to legitimate and stabilize existing class relations, often by representing as natural or universal what is in fact historically specific and class-interested. The German Ideology (1845–1846, Marx and Engels) is the classical text; the contemporary literature on ideology (from Karl Mannheim through Louis Althusser, Slavoj Žižek, and the broader critical theory tradition) develops the analysis in various directions.

The materialist transformation of Hegelian dialectic

Marx famously claimed to have stood Hegel on his feet. Where Hegel's dialectic was idealist (the unfolding of Geist through history), Marx's was materialist (the unfolding of material conditions of production through history). The dialectical structure (the working out of internal contradictions; the production of new forms through the negation and preservation of previous forms) was preserved; the metaphysical content was transformed.

Whether the materialist transformation succeeds (whether dialectical patterns of explanation actually apply to economic and historical phenomena in the way Marx supposed) is contested. The defenders include the contemporary Marxist tradition broadly; the critics include both anti-Marxist philosophers and various non-Marxist heirs of Hegel who argue that materializing the dialectic destroys what was valuable in it.

Key works

• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (composed 1844; first published 1932). The early manuscripts on alienation.
• The German Ideology (composed 1845–1846, with Engels; first published 1932). The classical statement of historical materialism.
• Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Eleven short notes; the famous eleventh: The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
• The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Engels). The famous short political pamphlet of the 1848 revolutions.
• The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Marx's analysis of the French coup d'état of 1851; one of the great works of political analysis.
• Grundrisse (composed 1857–1858; first published 1939–1941). The notebooks preparing the way for Capital.
• A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). The Preface contains the classical statement of historical materialism.
• Capital Volume I (1867); Volumes II (1885) and III (1894) published posthumously by Engels.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Hegel (the philosophical framework); the Young Hegelians (Bauer, Strauss, Feuerbach); classical political economy (Smith, Ricardo); French utopian socialism (Saint-Simon, Fourier); the British Chartist movement; Aristotle (whose analysis of political economy and eudaimonia Marx engaged seriously); the political experience of the failed European revolutions of 1848.

Influenced: incalculably broad. The political traditions descending from Marx (Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Western Marxism, contemporary democratic socialism); the intellectual traditions in dialogue with him (Critical Theory through Adorno, Habermas, and the Frankfurt School; Western Marxism through Lukács, Gramsci, Korsch; structural Marxism through Althusser; analytical Marxism through G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer; postmodernism in its many engagements with Marx; recent revivals through David Harvey, Wendy Brown, Slavoj Žižek). The disciplines substantially shaped by Marxist thought include sociology, political science, history, anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, and the philosophy of social science.

Reception

Marx's reception in his lifetime was substantial within the European socialist movement but largely confined to it. The broader academic and political reception developed primarily in the decades after his death, especially after the publication of the posthumous volumes of Capital.

The twentieth century saw Marx's reception transformed by political events. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent development of Marxism-Leninism made Marx the official philosopher of a major world power and shaped Marx's reception (in defenders and critics alike) for the next seven decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991 produced a brief period of triumphalist anti-Marxism; the subsequent recurring crises of capitalism (especially the 2007–2008 financial crisis) have produced renewed scholarly and political engagement with Marx independent of the Soviet framework.

The academic reception has been continuously vigorous in multiple disciplines. The Critical Theory tradition (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, Honneth) has been the most extensive Western Marxist engagement; Italian operaismo, French structuralism (Althusser, Balibar), and British cultural studies (Williams, Hall) have produced major work; recent contributions include David Harvey's substantial body of work on capitalism and urbanization, the analytical Marxism of G.A. Cohen and his successors, and the work of Wendy Brown, Cinzia Arruzza, and others on the relation between Marxism, feminism, and contemporary political economy.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes G.A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History (1978; revised 2000), Allen Wood's Karl Marx (1981; revised 2004), Jonathan Wolff's Why Read Marx Today? (2002), Sven-Eric Liedman's A World to Win (2018, the major recent biography), and the substantial work of David Harvey. The major journals (New Left Review, Historical Materialism, Rethinking Marxism) document ongoing scholarship. The complete works are being published in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), an ongoing critical edition. Active scholarly debates concern the relation between the early and late Marx, the labor theory of value's continued viability, the relation between Marx's analysis and contemporary capitalism, and the question of Marx's place in twenty-first-century political and economic thought.

Further reading

• Hegel — the philosophical predecessor whose dialectic Marx materialized
• German Idealism — the tradition Marx emerged from
• Dialectic — the central methodological concept
• Justice — the political concept Marx's work both engages and reframes
• Aristotle — the predecessor whose political economy Marx engaged carefully
• Phenomenology of Spirit — the Hegelian work whose master-slave dialectic Marx transformed

The philosopher, economist, and revolutionary whose work produced one of the most influential intellectual frameworks of the modern era.