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The Marx family was very liberal and the Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during Kart’s early Education Marx received good marks in gymnasium, the Prussian secondary education school. His senior thesis, which anticipated his later development of a social analysis of religion, was a treatise entitled “Religion: The Glue That Binds Society Together”, for which he won a prize. In 1833 Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn to study law, at his father’s behest.
He joined the Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as he spent most of his time singing songs in beer halls, The next year, his father made him transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Predict-Whimsies-Sensitivet in Berlin (now known as the Humboldt University). Marx and Young Hegelian In Berlin, Mar’s interests turned to philosophy, much to his father’s dismay, and he joined the circle Of students and young professors known as the ‘Young Hegelian”, led by Bruno Bauer.
Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. Another Young Hegelian, Max Steiner, applied Hegelian criticism and argued that stopping nap. ‘here short of nihilistic egoism was mysticism. His views were not accepted y most of his colleagues, and Karl Marx responded in parts of Die Deutsche Ideologies (The German Ideology), but decided not to publish it. Nevertheless Steiner’s book was the main reason Marx abandoned the Breaching view and developed the basic concept of historical materialism.
George Hegel had recently died in 1831, and during his lifetime was an extremely influential figure at Frederica-Wilhelm-Universityt and in German academia in general. The Hegelian establishment (known as the Right Hegelian) in place at Predict-Wilhelm maintained that the series of historical dialectics had men completed, and that Prussian society as it existed was the culmination of all social development to date, with an extensive civil service system, good universities, industrialization. And high employment.
The Young Hegelian with whom Marx was associated believed that there were still further dialectical changes to come, and that the Prussian society of the time was far from perfect as it still contained pockets Of poverty, government censorship was in place, and non-Lutheran suffered from religious discrimination. Marx was warned not to submit his doctoral dissertation at the Frederica Wilhelm. Universityt, as it would certainly be poorly received there due to his reputation as a Young Hegelian radical.
Marx instead submitted his dissertation, which compared the atomic theories of Democratic and Epicures, to the University of Jean in 1840, where it was accepted. Career When his mentor Bruno Bauer was dismissed from the philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the Reminisce Getting, a radical Cologne newspaper. After the newspaper was shut in 1843, in part due to Mar’s conflicts with government censors, Marx returned o philosophy, turned to political activism, and worked as a freelance journalist, Marx soon moved, however, something he would do often as a result of his radical views.
Marx first moved to Prance, where he re-evaluated his relationship With Bauer and the Young Hegelian, and wrote On the Jewish Question, mostly a critique Of current notions Of civil rights and political emancipation. It was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long collaborator Frederica Angels, who called Mar’s attention to the situation Of the working class and guided Mar’s interest in economics. After he was forced to leave Paris for his writings, he and Angels moved to Brussels, Belgium.
An older Marx There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a critique of the philosophy of Hegel and the Young Hegelian. Marx next wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Angels’ most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, which was commissioned by the Communist League (tormenter, the League of the Just), an organization of German magis whom Marx had met in London.
That year Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval: a working-class movement seized power from King Louis Philippe in Prance and invited Marx to return to Paris. When this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and restarted the Reminisce Getting, only to be swiftly expelled again. Mar’s final move avgas to London. In 1852 Marx wrote his famous pamphlet The Eighteenth Barmier of Louis Bonaparte, in which he analyzed Napoleon Ills takeover of France. From 1852 to 1861, while in London, Marx contributed to Horace Greenery’s New York Tribune as its European correspondent.
First International and Gladstone Quote In 1863, Chancellor Of the Exchequer William Reward Gladstone gave a budget speech to Parliament in which he commented on the increase in Britain’s national wealth, and added (according to the report of the speech in the Times), “l should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that it was confined to the class who are in easy circumstances. This takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the laboring population. The augmentation I have described and which is founded, I think. On accurate returns, is an
Dads Capital (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy), Marx published the first volume in 1867. The remaining two volumes of Capital were never completed by Marx, but were reconstructed by Angels from extensive notes and drafts, and published posthumously. Throughout the London period of Mar’s life, his family was generally impoverished and depended on generous contributions from Angels to get by. Marx died in London in the year 1883, and is buried in Highest Cemetery, London. Marital life Mar’s wife, Jenny von Westphalia, came from an aristocratic background.
Her uncle was Lion Philips, father Of the brothers Gerard and Anton Who founded the famous Philips company in 1891. The Maries had many children, several of whom died young their daughter Eleanor (1855-1898), born in London, was also a committed socialist and helped edit her father’s works. Jenny Marx died in December 1881. Influences on Mar’s philosophy Mar’s thought was heavily influenced by both the dialectical historicism of George Wilhelm Frederica Hegel and the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Richard.
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 is inevitable. However, Marx famously asserted that “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it”, and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to change the frolic Consequently, most followers of Marx are not fatalists, but activists who believe that revolutionaries must organize social change.
G. W. P. Hegel Mar’s philosophy (Which Angels but not Marx called dialectical materialism) s certainly influenced by Hedge’s claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically, through a clash of opposing forces. This is sometimes caricatured into the Trinitarian famous: thesis antithesis -?? synthesis. 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 moment 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 – bipedal upheavals against existing status quo, While Marx accepted this broad conception tot history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set upon its feet.
Mar’s acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hedge’s idealism avgas greatly influenced by Ludwig Paperback_ In The Essence of Christianity, V-rehab 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 overloud 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.
But 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 ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly. The other important contribution to Mar’s revision of Hegelianism was Angels’ book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to incentive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution.
Mar’s philosophy The notion tot labor is fundamental in Mar’s thought. Basically, Marx argued that humans have the capacity to transform their circumstances, and he calls this process of transformation “labor” and the capacity to transform circumstances labor power. For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the human mind and human imagination: A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to home many an architect in the construction of her cells.
But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. Beyond his claim about the human capacity to transform nature, Marx makes no other claims about “human nature. ‘ Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic and, with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxist express their views by contrasting “nature” with “history”. Sometimes they use the phrase “existence recedes consciousness”.
The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, the main feature of human nature is adaptability, Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time.
Mar’s analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means f production, literally those things, such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the social relations of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode Of production to a capitalist mode Of production.
In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the elation’s Of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict. 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 scientist and materialist, 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. Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labor-power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation.
As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one’s own labor one’s capacity to transform the world is tantamount to being alienated from one’s own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in Which people Come to believe that it is the very things that they produce that are powerful, and the sources of power and creativity, rather than people themselves.
He argued that When this happens, people begin to mediate all their relationships among themselves and with others through commodities. Commodity fetishism is an example of what Angels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, UT which are presented as universal and eternal.
Marx and Angels’ point was not only that such beliefs are wrong; they serve an important political function, Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded tort some truth about political relations.
For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produced them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to Marx and Angels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labor-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Mar’s understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the Contribution to the Critique of Hedge’s “Philosophy of Right:” Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed return, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way Of expressing and coping with social inequality. Mar’s critique of capitalism Marx argued that this alienation of labor power (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism.
Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land or tools necessary to produce, people sell their labor- power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period often (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work).
In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor rower to live are “proletarians. ” The person who buys the labor power, generally someone vivo does own the land and technology to produce, is a “capitalist” or “bourgeois. ” (NOTE: Marx considered this an objective description of capitalism, distinct from any one Of a variety of ideological claims Of or about capitalism). The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists. Marx distinguished capitalists from merchants.
Merchants buy goods in one place and sell them in another; more precisely, they buy things in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws pushily and demand operate within even markets, there is often a difference between the price off commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage. And hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist.
Marx observed that in practically every successful industry the price for labor was lower than the price tooth manufactured good. Marx called this difference “surplus value” and argued that this surplus value was in fact the source of a fatalist’s profit. The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production.
But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source f profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate Of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse.
Marx understood that during such a crisis the price Of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors Of the economy. Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long. ERM consequence fifths process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat.
He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution was required. Finally, he theorized that to maintain the socialist system, a proletarian dictatorship must be established and maintained.
Mar’s critique of bourgeois democracy and of anti-Semitism A small number of scholars have presented an alternative reading of Marx, based on his essays On the Jewish Question. Economist Tyler Cowmen, historian Marvin Perry, and political scientist Joshua Mariachis have suggested that what they see as an intense hatred for the “Jewish Class” was part Of Mar’s belief that if he could convince his contemporaries and the public to hate Jewish capitalists, the public would eventually come to hate non-Jewish capitalists as well.
Most scholars reject this claim for two reasons: first, it is based on two short says written in the sass, and ignores the bulk of Mar’s analysis of capitalism written in the following years. Second, it distorts the argument of On the Jewish Question, in which Marx deconstructs liberal notions of emancipation. During the Enlightenment, philosophers and political theorists argued that religious authority had been oppressing human beings, and that religion must be separated from the functions of the state for people to be truly tree. Following the French Revolution, many people were thus calling for the emancipation of the Jews.
At the same time, many argued that Christianity is a more enlightened and advanced religion than Judaism, Poor example, Mar’s former mentor, Bruno Bauer, argued that Christians need to be emancipated only once (from Christianity), and Jews need to be emancipated twice first from Judaism (presumably, by converting to Christianity), then from religion altogether. Marx rejects Barber’s argument as a form of Christian ethnocentrism, if not anti-Semitic. Marx proceeds to turn Barber’s language, and the rhetoric of anti- Smites, upside down to make a more progressive argument.
First, he points out that Bruno Barber’s argument is too parochial because it considers Christianity o be more evolved than Judaism, and because it narrowly defines the problem that requires emancipation to be religion. Marx instead argues that the issue is not religion, but capitalism. Pointing out that anti-Semitic stereotypes Of Jews are fundamentally anti-capitalist, Marx provides a theory of anti-Semitism by suggesting that anti-Smites scapegoat Jews for capitalism because too many non-Jews benefit from, or are invested in capitalism, to attack capitalism directly.
Marx also uses this rhetoric ironically to develop his critique of bourgeois notions of emancipation. Marx points out that the bourgeois notion of freedom s predicated on choice (in politics, through elections; in the economy, through the market), but that this form of freedom is antisocial and alienating. Although Bauer and other liberals believe that emancipation means freedom to choose, Marx argues that this is at best a very narrow notion tromped. Thus, what Bauer believes would he the emancipation of the Jews is for Marx actually alienation, not emancipation.
After explaining that he is not referring to real Jews or to the Jewish religion, Marx appropriates this anti-Semitic rhetoric against itself (in a way that parallels his Hegelian argument that capitalism contains the seeds f its own destruction) by using “Judaism” ironically as a metaphor for capitalism, In this sense, Marx states, all Europeans are “Jewish”. This is a pun on two levels. First, if the Jews must be emancipated, Marx is saying that all Europeans must be emancipated.
Second, if by “Judaism” one really means “capitalism,” then far from Jews needing to be emancipated from Christianity (as Bauer called for), Christians need to be emancipated from Judaism (meaning, bourgeois society). See: works by historian Hal Draper and David McClellan. See also: Roots Of anti- Semitism: Karl Mar’s On the Jewish Question. The body of work of Marx and Angels covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Angels have drawn on this work to propose a political and economic philosophy dubbed Marxism.
Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxist over how to interpret Mar’s writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions (and it is important to distinguish between “Marxism” and “what Marx believed”; for example, shortly before he died in 1880, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers’ leader Jules Guessed, ND to Mar’s son-in-law Paul Leverage, accusing them of “revolutionary phrase- mongering” and tot denying the value tot retorts struggles; “it that is Marxism” – paraphrasing what Marx wrote ‘then am not a Marxist”), Essentially, people use the word “Marxist” to describe those who rely on Mar’s conceptual language (e. G. Ode of production, class, commodity fetishism) to understand capitalist and other societies, or to describe those who believe that a workers’ revolution is the only means to a communist society. Six years after Mar’s death, Angels and others founded the “Second International” as a base for continued political activism. This organization collapsed in 1914, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein “evolutionary” socialism, and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I. World War I also led to the Russian Revolution and the consequent ascendancy of Vladimir Linen’s leadership of the communist movement, embodied in the “Third International”.
Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and developed a political program. Called Leninism or Bolshevism, which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized Communist Party. After Linen’s death, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet union, Joseph Stalin, seized control of the Party and state apparatus. He argued that before a world-wide communist revolution would be possible, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to dedicate itself building communism in its own country, At this time, Leon Trotsky left the Soviet Union and in 1934 founded the competing “Fourth International. Some followers of Trotsky argued that Stalin had created a bureaucratic state rather than a socialist state. In China Mao Sedona also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that secants and not just workers could play a leading role in a communist revolution. This was a profound departure from Mar’s own view Of revolution, which focused exclusively on the urban proletariat, and which he believed would take place in advanced industrial societies such as Prance, Germany and England. In the sass and ‘ass, a group of dissident Marxist founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among them Max Herkimer, Theodore Adorn, Erich From. And Herbert Marcus. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School.