Documentation:Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a Prussian economist, philosopher, and sociologist. Together with Friedrich Engels, he developed The Communist Manifesto, his most famous work that outlines his socialist ideology and calls for a reform to what he perceived to be a corrupt capitalist system. Marx's theories laid the groundwork for a great deal of other socialist thinkers, many of whom have expanded upon and interpreted his ideas to form the basis of contemporary Marxism.

Biography

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Prussia to Henrietta Pressburg and Heinrich Marx, the latter of whom worked as a relatively successful lawyer for most of his life. Marx was Jewish by ancestry, though his father converted to Lutheranism prior to his birth as a consequence of the anti-semitism in Europe. Heinrich was a noted reformist, one who actively called for change to the absolute monarchy that governed Prussia at the time.

Marx was baptized into the Lutheran Church in 1824. He was homeschooled until age 12, at which point he began attending Trier High School. Hugo Wyttenbach, the school's headmaster, hired a number of liberal humanists to educate the adolescents, infuriating Trier's conservative government. Consequently, the school was raided in 1832. A number of texts encouraging a liberal view of politics were discovered during the raid, and the government subsequently instituted many reforms and changed several staff members during the time that Marx attended. He later studied law at the University of Bonn, but his poor grades lead his father to transfer him to the University of Berlin.

During his time at university, Marx became interested in philosophy, particularly in the works of G. W. F. Hegel, and sought to combine it with law, his subject of study. He joined a group of radical thinkers who called themselves the Young Hegelians in 1837, who utilized Hegel's dialectical method in order to criticize established social institutions. In 1841, Marx completed his thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, controversial for its prioritization of philosophy over theology. After receiving his PhD, he began writing for the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper in which be first began expressing his socialist and economic perspectives, but the paper was banned by the Prussian government in 1843.

In his 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question”, published in the radical newspaper the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx first made clear his views on the potentially revolutionary proletariat and allied himself with communism. He met Friedrich Engels the following year, and soon after the two were collaborating on works that expressed their similar views regarding the working class and its social conditions. Around the same time, Marx began a thorough study of economics and the French socialists, which, along with Hegel's dialectics, would form the basis of his political thinking. His Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 detail much of the formation of his political economy that he would later devote his life to, including his concept of alienated labour. In 1845, he published his Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, in which he espoused historical materialism and called for philosophers to move from interpretation to active change. Finally, in 1848, Marx and Engels produced The Communist Manifesto, a programme of action for the new political party the Communist League.

Despite constant social and political harassment, both Marx and Engels continued to support communism and call for the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie over the following decades, with Marx espousing his ideas in The New York Tribune from 1852 – 1863. Marx was at his most prolific from the late 1850's through the 1860's, publishing A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, both The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof and The Working Day in 1867, and a number of other influential works over that time period. In the 1870's, however, Marx's health began to dissipate, leading to a sharp decline in his quantity of work before his death from bronchitis and pleurisy in 1883.

Key Terms

Capitalism - The social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned by a minority of the population, who often oppress and take advantage of those who are outside the privileged few.

Materialism - The world as made up of natural, physical things (food, shelter) rather than idealistic or spiritual abstractions.

Economic Determinism - The view that economics form the basis of everything else.

Proletariat - The world, in a Marxist perspective, is divided between the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie. The Proletariat are those who labour to produce products and goods, selling their labour.

Bourgeoisie - Those who have capital, and use it to purchase labour through wages, exploiting the labour (and the Proletariat) to acquire personal wealth.

Capital - Money that capitalists use to purchase goods or labour for the purpose of making a profit.

Alienation of Labour - Workers produce products but see one small part of what they produce and never see it in its entirety, therefore losing a sense of worth as the labour they are doing is being fragmented.

Use Value - Value from workers using the thing that they produce.

Exchange Value - Commodities generated by workers for the purpose of being sold on the market.

Commodification - People being valued mainly as producers and purchasers of commodities, generating fabricated human worth through numbers, statistics and cogs.

Commodities - Products that can be bought and sold.

Commodity Fetish - The cycle of commodities provoking the desire for even more commodities.