Karl Marx
1818-1883
Background
• Was born third of seven children to a Jewish family in
Trier, Prussia in the western province of the Rhineland
• Father converted to Christianity as a Lutheran in 1818
because of the potential loss of his law practice
• Father introduced the value of knowledge exposing Marx
to Enlightenment thinkers as well as German, and Greek
classics
• Educated at home until the age of thirteen
Background
• Graduated from the Trier Gymnasium and enrolled at
the University of Bonn to study law at his fathers advice
• He was interested in studying philosophy and literature
but his father wouldn’t allow it because he didn’t
believe he would be able to support himself
• A year later father forced him to transfer to Humboldt
University of Berlin where he ended up studying
philosophy and earning his doctorate in 1841
• While at University of Berlin he met and joined the
group called the Young Hegelians
Background
• Marx did not stay with Hegelians long due to an
opposition to the spiritual idealism of their philosophy
• In 1841 Marx met Moses Hess who introduced him to
Communism and wrote for Hess’ paper Rheinische Zeitung
where he wrote about social conditions. Hess also linked
him together with Friedrich Engels
• In 1844 in France Marx and Engels met face to face for
the first time. Engels would guide Marx’s interest in
economics
• Marx and Engels formed the Communist Correspondence
Committee. The two then in 1847 attended the Second
Congress of the communist league where they presented a
detailed plan on how Communism should be organized this
became the Communist Manifesto and was published in 1848
• The same year the Manifesto was published Marx was
suspected in taking part in a revolt In Brussels and was
expelled from the country with his wife and children
• He would move to France and be expelled from there,
triggering his move to London where he would live for the rest
of his life
Family Life
• Marx married Jenny von westphalen, the educated
daughter of a Prussian Baron in 1843. The couple were
engaged when he was seventeen but his family didn’t want
him to get married so young so they waited several years
• Von Westphalen’s family didn’t like Marx's Jewish heritage
or his social standing and even threatened to cut her off
financially
• Only her father, who was the follower of French socialist
Saint-Simon, was fond of Marx
Family Life
• Marx had seven children but only three survived to
adulthood
• Marx's daughter became a socialist as well and helped edit
his works
• His wife died in 1881 and he died of bronchitis in 1883.
The messages carved on his tombstone are ‘ workers of all
lands unite’ and “the philosophers have only interpreted
the world in various ways- the point however is to change
it’
Intellectual influences
• The Enlightenment and Romanticsim
• Formative years consumed with the liberal spirit of
enlightenment
• Many divergent doctrines of Enlightenment through:
French philosophers were rationalists, the British
sensationalists, and others like La Mettrie were
materialists
Intellectual influences
• All shared common belief in the possibility of altering human
environment in such a way to allow more wholesome
development of human capacities
• Marx sought revolutionary change as pre-condition for
realization of liberal idealism of : Secularism, Universalism,
and rationalism
• Marx's ideas of self-realization, human potential, guideline
for society, and search of “laws” of evolutionary form were
all influenced by Enlightenment and Romanticism
Intellectual influences
• German Idealism
• Marx came to believe conflict is inevitable due to Kant's
pessimistic view of human progress
• Kant's Second Discourse was an early source for Marx's
notion of alienation
• Marx's philosophical studies took place in an intellectual
climate dominated by thought of Hegel and his followers
• German Idealism (cont.)………
• Marx general aim was to evaluate Hegel's political
philosophy
• In Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of right (1843) Marx
describes his philosophical differences with Hegelian
thought:
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–
–
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Hegel started with abstract ideas instead of concrete reality
His defense of the Monarchy
Disagreement on the role of bureaucracy
Disagreement on the sovereignty of the state
Intellectual influences
• German Idealism (cont.)……..
• Marx learned of the holistic approach through
Hegel's ides of totality
• Marx's version of Communism was free to mankind
from the division of labor
• Ludwig Feuerbach
• Important link between Hegel and Marx
• Marx read and was influenced by Essence of Christianity
• Believed that Feuerbach successfully criticized Hegel's
concept of the spirit of man
• Was also struck by humanistic aspects of Feuerbach's work
• Ludwig Feuerbach (cont.)…….
• Didn’t agree on everything. Eleven points summarize Marx's
disagreements with Feuerbach;
– Doesn't conceive human activity as objective reality
– The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human
thinking is not a question of theory, but a practical one
– The coincidence of changing circumstances can be conceived only as
a revolutionary practice
– Feuerbach starts from fact of religious self alienation and believes
the world should be secular
• Ludwig Feuerbach (cont.)…….
-Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation
- Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence
- Feuerbach doesn't see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social
product
- All social life is essentially practical
• Ludwig Feuerbach (cont.)…….
- The highest point reached by contemplative materialism is the
contemplation of single persons in civil society
- The stand point of the old materials is civil society, the standpoint of the
new human society
- Marx states “ the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point, however is to change it.”
• Friedrich Engels
• Most important influential person in Marx's life
• Marx and Engels demanded a better order of society
• Their famous, Manifesto of the Communist Party, discusses
the main principles of the socialism they worked out
• The two friends were the heart and soul of the
revolutionary-democratic aspiration throughout Europe
• Friedrich Engels (cont.)…..
• Through Engels, Marx was introduced to the concrete
conditions and misery of the working class
• They were the first to show that the working class and
their struggles were a result of the ruling class’s attempts
to oppress the proletariat
• Marx and Engels attempted to organize the working class
into revolution, so that they could attain economic and
political freedom
Marxist Concepts
• Human Potential
• Marx believed that societies prior to capitalism were too
oppressive of humans to realize their full potential
• He thought that capitalism was still too oppressive for most
people to realize their full potential, but saw capitalism as
a necessary evil for the sake of Communism
Marxist Concepts
• Human Potential (cont.)……..
• Marx thought Communism would provide the type of
environment for people to start realizing and expressing
their full potential
• Marx used the concept of species being when talking about
human potential to separate man from animals
German Ideology
• This was a written piece that Engels and Marx said was to
settle accounts with former philosophical ideas.
• In this account, they critique Feuerbach, Max Stirner, the
Holy Family, and the Young Hegelians
German Ideology
• Said that the Young Hegelians were fighting phrases
with phrases dubbing them “heroes of the mind”
Marx said Hegelian thought did not address the
relationship between consciousness or thought and
the reality which the thought or consciousness is
about
• This is said to be one of their major achievements in
which they set out to cut through the metaphysical
of the young Hegelians and sets out the Materialistic
conception of history
Historical Materialism
• The concept of Historical Materialism was established in
The German Ideology
• Marx wanted to reconcile materialism and idealism by
combining critical and scientific aspects of materialism
with the dynamic and historical components of idealism
• He rejected the ideas of simple non-belief and Hegel's view
of reality accepting a materialist view and combining in it
with Hegel's dynamic and dialectical process this is what is
referred to as historical materialism
Class Consciousness and false
consciousness
• Marx said that people are different from animals
because we have consciousness as well as the ability
to link consciousness to their activities
• Class consciousness is the sense of common
identification among members of a given class
Class Consciousness and false
consciousness
• False consciousness refers to the inability to clearly see
where one’s own best interest lie
• Class consciousness is illustrated by ones relative position
to the means of production and access to scarce resources
• Marx was speaking of consciousness in the terms as society
as a whole and not on an individual level
Religion
• Marx saw religion as an example of false consciousness. He
also thought it was another abstract creation that had
become reified throughout time
• Thought was one of the biggest factors preventing full
human potential
Religion
• Said that the power elites encouraged the weak masses to
keep them in power and he even referred to religion as the
opiate of the masses
• Marx was against religion for three reasons:
- Thought it was a distraction keep man from his essence
– He felt that while man was in this distracted state, he allowed
himself to be exploited and controlled
Class Theory
• The critical issue in an industrial society is production and
the distribution of land. Those who controlled the land
would control through means of production
• Classes were formed to control the means of property
possession. This would in turn result in class conflicts
Grundrisse
• Grundrisse is a manuscript of seven notebooks compiled
from 1857-1858
• It was published in 1941 and was the culmination of his
economic studies
• A lot of Marx’s themes appear in Grundrisse’s book
Alienation
• Alienation, according to Marx, is a condition in which
humans become dominated by the forces of their own
creation
• The first stage of alienation is alienation from the product
that the workers produce. The laborers also do not know
the aspects of the production process they are working in
Alienation
• Second, workers are alienated from the process of
production. They are not involved in productive activity
meaning that they are not working to satisfy their own
needs. They become alienated because it is not satisfying
and becomes monotonous eventually becoming alienated
from ones self
• Last, the worker becomes alienated from his fellow
workers
Means of Production &
Capitalism
• Karl Marx
• Marx defines the Means of
production as the combination
of the means of labor which
include equipment, tools, ect
and the subject of labor or the
actual material worked with for
an item
• He defines capitalism as a mode
of production or the means
under which capitalists own the
means of production and the
workers sell them their labor
power to produce an item
• G.W.F Hegel
• Two concepts represents the
essence of Hegel's philosophy
which are Dialectic and
Idealism
• Dialectic is considered to be an
image of the world that stresses
the importance of processes,
relations, conflicts and
contradictions
• Idealism emphasizes the
importance of the mind and
mental processes
• Hegel would have considered
capitalism an mental bi product
Commodities and the
production of surplus value
• A commodity is an object that is capable of satisfying
some want or need
• Object are products that cannot achieve independent
existence
• Use value are objects that produced for use by ones self
• Exchange value happens when the product produced is
for trade and not personal use
Fetishism of commodities
• Fetishism of commodities occurs when actors don’t
recognize that their labor gives commodities their value
• The value is believed to come from natural properties
• Exchange value of a commodity is expressed by its use
value
Capital
• Capital involves the social relationship between buyers and
sellers
• Marx felt that since the workers labor gave the product value
they also had the capacity to change the system
• He also believed that a superstructure existed composed of
raw materials, labor, technology and those who control the
means of production
Private Property
• Private property is made from the labor of workers and
reified by capitalism
• Private property is defined as the private ownership of the
means of production
• Marx felt that if human potential was to be realized that
the notion of private property must be suppressed
• Felt that the means of production should be shared equally
through public ownership
Division of labor
• In the German ideology the roots of labor division were
traced and Marx equates the family as the earliest model
describing the wife and children as slaves
• The capitalist system surplus was created and controlled
production and the surplus as well, making it possible for
divisions and classes to create
• The surplus of materials comes with the unequal sharing of
the surplus creating a struggle between peoples. Marx
believed that Communism would eliminate the division of
labor
Communism
• Communism is a form of government which attempts to empower
workers and eliminate social class. Its socioeconomic structure
promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on
common ownership of the Means of production. It is usually
considered a branch of the broader socialist movement that draws on
the various political and intellectual movements that trace their
origins back to the work of theorists of the industrial revolution and
the French Revolution. Communism attempts to offer an alternative
to the problems believed to be inherent with representative
democracy, capitalist economies and the legacy of imperialism and
colonialism. The dominant forms of communism, such as Leninism,
Trotskyism and Luxemburg's, are based on Marxism. Karl Marx is
sometimes known as the "father of Communism", but non-Marxist
versions of communism (such as Christian communism and anarchist
communism) also exist.
Relevancy
• Marxist thought is very controversial
• Despite lack of complete understanding of the role of
capitalism in the future, many contumacy authors use
Marxist economic analysis in their own attempts to
understand modern Capitalism
• Marx's analysis of the differences between use value and
exchange value are relevant in the criticism of
globalization
Relevancy
• Reaching ones full human potential has never been a more
important goal especially in American society
• Marx has been proven correct that religion continues to
serve as a higher barrier against peace and accord
• Many people still suffer from forms of alienation and have
gone after leisure pursuits as a means to attain a level of
identification and form a sense of community
• Marx would be happy with the Internet, it is the consumerthe proletariat that is using the net to gain control
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