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 all of the fruits of their labour beyond the amounts necessary for their subsistence. 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 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". In 1846 Marx wrote The German Ideology with Engels, a text which lays the foundation for The Communist Manifesto. 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

Philosophy

Marx was influenced by the German ideology of the 18th century and early 19th centuries, and in particular by Ludwig Feuerbach's humanist contention that man has invented God in his own image. He accepted that man had invented God, but argued he had done so in order to deaden the pain of the poverty-stricken misery of life on earth. He was not content with a philosophy that deals only in beliefs and ideals, arguing that it should seek a reasoned explanation of the physical interactions between man and his environment. He considered existing explanations to be inadequate, and his own search for an explanation led him to adapt the teachings of the classical economists and to develop the historicist teachings of the German ideologists. He became convinced that intolerable hardship is an inherent characteristic of capitalism and that it could be be overcome only by its replacement by the version of communism that he and Friedrich Engels set out in the Communist Manifesto. He also became convinced that the historical development of capitalism would lead ultimately to its collapse, and that the state would then be replaced by an undefined form of social governance that he termed "the dictatorship of the proletariat". The hastening of that outcome became his main objective and he turned away from philosophy on the grounds that, as he put it, "philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it..

Economics

Karl Marx used the classical economics concepts of use value and exchange value to construct his own labour theory of value. He took the exchange value of a commodity to be determined by the time required for its production. (He actually said it was the "socially necessary time", by which he meant the time taken by a typical worker). He treated labour as a commodity whose exchange value (or cost to the capitalist employer) to be the value of the goods necessary for its supplier's subsistence, and he took the use value of of labour (to its employer) to be the value of what its supplier produces. The capitalist employer's profit is thus the excess of the use value of labour over its exchange value: an excess which he terms "surplus value". Using those statements as axioms, Marx made extensive use of logical deduction to construct a comprehensive theory of capitalist economics. Unemployment is explained as the result of employers' actions of introducing labour-saving material in response to a rise in the cost of labour. Marx was preoccupied with the subject of economic growth and saw technical progress as its principle cause. He was probably the first economist to make a systematic attempt to explain the fluctuations in economic activity known as the business cycle. He considered that if technical progress were to slow down, the only way to maintain growth would be to invest more and more in machinery and buildings, as a result of which the rate of profit on new investment would fall, leading to a further reduction in growth. Also, in his view, any departure from the conditions necessary for steady growth would lead to the accumulation of unwanted stocks of goods, producing a downturn in economic activity - until price-cutting, in order to get rid of surpluses, put the process into reverse. .