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Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Marx was a philosopher, political economist, journalist, and revolutionary whose work reshaped the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century in ways he could not have foreseen and would not always have recognised. His critique of political economy — pursued through the last two decades of his life and never finished — produced Capital. His materialist conception of history proposed that social being determines consciousness, not the other way around. His early writing on alienation, unpublished in his lifetime, resurfaced in 1932 and reshaped his reception for a second time. The distinction between what Marx wrote and what “Marxism” became is itself part of the record — even in his own lifetime, he reportedly remarked, via Engels: “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist.”

Life

Born 5 May 1818 in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland. His family was Jewish on both sides; his father Heinrich, a lawyer, converted to Lutheranism around 1817 to continue practising under Prussian restrictions. Karl was baptised in 1824 with his siblings.

He studied law at Bonn (1835–36), then transferred to Berlin, where he turned from law to philosophy and fell in with the Young Hegelians. Doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841 — a dissertation on the difference between the Democritean and Epicurean philosophies of nature. Academic posts were closed to him by the political climate. He became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in 1842; the newspaper was suppressed by Prussian censors in March 1843.

He married Jenny von Westphalen in June 1843 and moved to Paris, where he wrote the manuscripts later known as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In August 1844 he met Friedrich Engels; the collaboration lasted forty years. Expelled from France at Prussian request in January 1845, he moved to Brussels. The Brussels years produced the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), The German Ideology (with Engels, 1845–46, largely unpublished in his lifetime), and The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) — a polemic against Proudhon. The Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Engels) was published in February 1848.

During the 1848 revolutions he returned to Cologne and edited the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Tried for incitement and acquitted; expelled by the Prussian authorities. He arrived in London in August 1849 and remained there for the rest of his life.

The London years were marked by poverty, sustained by Engels’ financial support. Several of the Marx children died in infancy or childhood. Helene Demuth, the family’s housekeeper, was part of the household throughout; her son Frederick Demuth, born in 1851, is accepted by most biographers as Marx’s. Marx spent the 1850s and 1860s reading daily in the British Museum, writing for the New York Daily Tribune (1851–62), and working toward Capital. The Grundrisse (1857–58), unpublished until 1939–41, represents an intermediate stage of the project. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy appeared in 1859, with the Preface that contains the most compressed statement of the materialist conception of history.

In 1864 the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) was founded in London; Marx wrote its inaugural address and became its central intellectual figure. Capital, Volume I was published in Hamburg in 1867. The International effectively split at the Hague Congress in 1872 — the dispute between Marx’s faction and the federalist wing led by Bakunin is part of both men’s histories.

Jenny Marx died on 2 December 1881. Marx died in London on 14 March 1883. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery. Engels delivered the graveside speech.

Critique of political economy

The project Marx pursued through his last two decades and never completed. It builds on and against classical political economy — Adam Smith, David Ricardo, François Quesnay. The published result in his lifetime is Capital, Volume I (1867); Volumes II and III were edited from his manuscripts by Engels and published posthumously (1885, 1894). How much shaping Engels did is an open question in twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship; the reader of Volumes II and III encounters Marx via Engels’ editorial hand.

Marx’s method moves from the simplest category — the commodity — outward. The commodity has two faces: use-value (its usefulness) and exchange-value (the proportion in which it exchanges with other commodities). The labour theory of value, inherited from Ricardo, is restated: the magnitude of value is determined by socially necessary labour time. From this Marx derives surplus-value — the difference between the value the worker produces and the value of the labour-power the worker sells — which is the source of capital’s self-expansion. Capital is treated as a social relation, not a thing.

The commodity fetish — the way relations between people take on the appearance of relations between things — is developed in the opening chapter of Capital and is one of the concepts that connects the critique of political economy to the earlier work on alienation and ideology.

Materialist conception of history

Marx’s own term. “Historical materialism” comes from Engels and later writers. The condensed statement is in the 1859 Preface:

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

The fuller passage sets out the picture: human beings enter into relations of production independent of their will; the totality of these relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the foundation on which legal and political superstructures arise. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life.

The 1859 Preface formulation is often treated as canonical, but it is also unusually compressed; later readers have read more — and sometimes more determinism — into it than the rest of Marx’s writing supports. The Eighteenth Brumaire gives the counterweight: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Alienation

Primarily a theme of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx distinguishes four dimensions of estranged labour: the worker is alienated from the product (which belongs to another), from the activity of labour itself, from species-being (the human capacity for free, conscious productive activity), and from other people.

The 1844 Manuscripts were unpublished in Marx’s lifetime. They first appeared in 1932. Twentieth-century reception of Marx — particularly the “humanist Marx” reading of the 1950s and 1960s — was substantially reshaped by their publication. Whether the early Marx of alienation and species-being is continuous with the later Marx of Capital, or whether the late work supersedes the early, is a real interpretive question that scholarship has not closed.

Critique of ideology

Developed primarily in The German Ideology (with Engels, 1845–46) and the Theses on Feuerbach (1845). The view: ideas, beliefs, and theoretical positions do not float free of social and material conditions — they are conditioned by them and often serve interests within them. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

The German Ideology was largely unpublished in Marx’s lifetime — Marx later remarked that he and Engels had abandoned the manuscript to “the gnawing criticism of the mice.”

Class, communism, and political vision

The Manifesto opens: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Marx’s political writings — The Class Struggles in France (1850), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), The Civil War in France (1871) — apply the analysis to specific historical episodes. His positive political vision is comparatively under-articulated, by design — he was wary of writing “recipes for the cook-shops of the future.” Where he is explicit, the best-known formulation is from the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875): “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

Where Marx stops

Marx’s critique is more fully developed than his construction. How the transition from capitalism to communism would proceed — and how a communist society would organise production, resolve disputes, and prevent the re-emergence of domination — is sketched rather than specified. His materialist conception of history, in its compressed 1859 form, has been read as more deterministic than his historical and political writings warrant; the tension between the structural account and the contingent, agent-centred analysis of the political works runs through his own writing, not only through later interpretations. And the unpublished status of his most philosophically ambitious early work — the 1844 Manuscripts, The German Ideology, the Grundrisse — means that the Marx who was read in the nineteenth century and the Marx who was read in the twentieth are substantially different figures, assembled from different portions of the archive.

Key works

See also: Hegel · Proudhon