Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Most everyone associates Karl Marx with an economic system called Communism. Actually, Marx called himself a Scientific Socialist, to distinguish his thought from that of the Utopian Socialists (St. Simon).
Most of us know about Communism as it has been practiced in places such as Cuba, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union), and The People's Republic of China.
The people of these countries, and many others around the world, experimented with Marxist theory in different ways. This is one of the reasons why Marx is considered to be one the most influential individuals of the 19th century. (Another reason is that Marx provided a most complete analysis of capitalism, the economic system he believed was necessary as preliminary to communism.) However, as with all great philosophers, Marx built his ideas upon the thoughts of those who came before him.
There are three distinct stages in the development of Marx's own thought.
The first stage is known as the young Marx. Marx was a student of Hegel, the self-proclaimed philosopher of freedom. At first, Marx gained attention as one the young Hegelians. In these early writings, Marx is very humanistic. Individual human beings are the main focus of his thoughts, with the central idea that humans are creative beings. (That human beings are creatures of wil
l.The young Marx uses the terms work, product, productivity and labor in his discussions of human creativity (drive to expression, fulfillment). He speaks of the human propulsion to create and his ideas focus on the material world. Human beings must work to survive. Work is the basic expression of humanity. Work is creativity. Individuals must enjoy their work (work must serve to fulfill, complete, the individual). Work is art.
In this way, Marx shows the influence of Immanuel Kant (and Jean Jacques Rousseau). It was Kant who postulated that humans act to shape the world; that individual conscious will drives the human condition; that humans choose to live as they do (for Kant, all choices are moral choices).
[It may be said that, where Sigmund Freud saw civilization as the result of sublimated sex drives, Marx saw civilization as the fulfillment of the human creative drive. For both Marx and Freud, civilization is the inevitable result of instinctual behavior; for the former, creative expression; for the latter, sexual fulfillment.]
It has been said of Marx that he turned Hegel on his head. Simply speaking, this meant that, where Hegel saw the ideal (the great spirit of freedom) inevitably unfolding through the course of history, Marx saw the real (the operations of the concrete, materialistic world we all live in) as determining the course of history.
He was born and educated in Germany. He became a newspaper editor and was very critical of economic and social conditions of the times. He had to resign and flee Cologne (Germany) because of his strong opinions. In 1844, he went to Paris, where he met his collaborator, Frederick Engels.
Marx's most significant writings include:
The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848
That year there were numerous revolutions throughout Europe. (See Revolutions of 1848). The old regime (or Ancienne Regime - "the Old Regime" or the system of government based on monarchies and alliances among them to maintain the peace of the continent) was facing yet another threat from the peoples of the nations under their rule.
The Communist Manifesto was extremely radical. The opening sentence was, "There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism." And the last line was, "Workers of the world unite!" This was a call to bring together the people (workers) of all nations to promote their common cause. This was a direct threat to the monarchies that governed each separate nation and to the growing spread of capitalism.
Das Kapital, published in three volumes between 1867 and 1894.
This was Marx's definitive work analyzing the workings of the economic theory that had evolved from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) and Thomas Malthus' "Dismal Science" of Economics.
Marx describes society is described as an arena of conflict. There are some people (capitalists) who own and control the means of production (factories, businesses) whose interests are in conflict with other people (workers) who actually work and produce goods and services that are sold in the marketplace.
Marx divides society into classes: the ruling/upper class (capitalists), the middle class (bourgeoisie), and the lower/working class (employees). The largest class is the workers, the smallest, the capitalists, with the bourgeoisie in the middle. Middle class people aspire to become upper class, the lower classes aspire to become bourgeois.
According to Marx, the interests of the different classes conflict in that the capitalists want to make as much profit as possible; the workers want to earn as much money as they can. This is defined as class warfare. Under capitalism, the rich become richer and poor become poorer, because the rich have ownership and control of the means of production. This system allows the capitalist to exploit (take advantage of) the worker in the following way:
The capitalist hires the worker to produce a product, say, a pencil. The capitalist pays for the raw materials (wood, lead), pays for the machinery (a pencil factory), and pays a wage to the worker. This total amount represents the actual value of what is produced (a pencil). In other words, the value of something produced by a human is composed of the effort of the person and the cost of the raw materials (which also represent effort of other people to harvest the raw materials, and bring them to market).
However, under the capitalist system, the capitalist sells the product for a greater amount than this value. This greater amount Marx calls surplus value. Capitalism cannot function without surplus value, because this represents the profit of the capitalist.
For Marx, surplus value was a rip off by the capitalist of the worker. Marx did not believe that the risk of the capitalist (who had the money, the control and the cooperation of the entire class of capitalists) represented any value (this is what modern economists claim).
Marx believed that surplus value was possible because the capitalists owned and controlled the means of production. Therefore, he argued, the means of production should be owned by the people, then the surplus value created by the system would accrue to all the people. This seemed like a good idea: everyone's life would be improved because the surplus value generated by the productive system would be a source of wealth for everyone to share.
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