Karl Marx (1818-1883: Germany)
Until quite recently, it has been said, almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claimed to be Marxist. That this statement is no longer true seems to give proof to one of Marx’s principal ideas: that every social system produces contradictions that lead to the rise of a new social system. Thus, no social system is permanent.
Marx believed that every phase of society’s history is determined by the economic productivity associated with that society: he wrote that the hand mill would produce a feudal society, the steam mill, industrial capitalism; he argued as well that capitalistic society would die and be replaced by a better, finer social system.
Although he is identified as German—Marx was born in Prussia and educated at the University of Berlin—his radical ideas led to his being expelled from Prussia several times, and he was invited to leave both France and Belgium. In 1849, he finally settled in England.
Throughout his life Marx collaborated with, and was supported by, Friedrich Engels, son of a wealthy German industrialist. Engels had seen the misery of the working-class poor while assigned to his father’s factory in Manchester, England. Together in 1847-1848 Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, with its famous phrase “Workers of the World, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,” after they had joined a league of emigrant socialists creating an organization renamed the Communist League.
League members asked Marx and Engels to compose a document outlining their program, and the two men responded with a text that set forth 10 steps toward establishing communism as a new political order. Their revolutionary ideas included a progressive income tax, the abolition of inheritance, and free education for all children. The ideas in The Communist Manifesto, however, were not widely known in Europe until Marx became famous for his connections with the International Working Men’s Association around 1864 and the Paris Commune in 1870.
Marx published the first volume of the great work outlining his social theories, Das Kapital, in 1867. After his death in 1883, Engels finished volumes two and three. Called the “Bible of the working class,” by colleagues in the International Working Men’s Association, Das Kapital describes the misery of industrial England, arguing that such misery would increase, the monopoly of capital would choke production, and capitalism and private property would eventually die.
The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1: “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848
© Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org)
Used with permission.
“Estranged Labour” from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx
© Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org)
Used with permission.
History of Economic Analysis, Excerpt from Part III, Joseph A. Schumpeter
© 1954 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Karl Marx
Photo: IRC. (2005). Retrieved May 18, 2006, from unitedstreaming
Marx rejected Utopian solutions and formulated instead a scientific socialism grounded in the study of history, industrial society, and the philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach. Perhaps his most innovative contribution was his method of analysis, in which dialectical logic was applied to the interpretation of history.
