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Karl Marx
Western Philosophy
19th-Century
Philosophy
Name
Karl Heinrich Marx
Birth
May 5, 1818 (Trier,
Prussia)
Death
March 14, 1883 (aged 64) (London, United
Kingdom)
School/Tradition
Marxism
Main Interests
Politics, Economics, Class Struggle
Notable Ideas
Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels), alienation
and exploitation of the worker, The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, Materialist
Conception of History
Influences
Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, Smith,
Ricardo, Rousseau, Goethe, Fourier, Comte
Influenced
Luxemburg, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao
Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Sartre,
Debord, Frankfurt School, Negri, Noam Chomsky, Michael Taussig many more…
Karl
Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a
19th century philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary.
Often called the father of communism, Marx was both a scholar and a political
activist. He addressed a wide range of political as well as social issues, but
is most famous for his analysis of history, summed up in the opening line of
the Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles”. Marx believed that
capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions
which will lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism,
capitalism itself will be displaced by a form of society which develops
communism, a classless society which emerges after a transitional period in
which the state is nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat.
On
the one hand, Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socioeconomic change.
On this model, it is the structural contradictions within capitalism which
necessitate its end, giving way to communism:
"The development of Modern Industry,
therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie
produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces,
above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable. "
(The Communist Manifesto)
On
the other hand, Marx argued that socioeconomic change occurred through
organized revolutionary action. On this model, capitalism will end through the
organized actions of an international working class: "Communism is for us
not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality
[will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which
abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result
from the premises now in existence." (from The German Ideology)
While
Marx was a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to
exert a major influence on workers’ movements shortly after his death. This
influence was given added impetus by the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in
the Russian October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were
not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century.
The relation of Marx to "Marxism" is a point of controversy. Marxism
remains influential and controversial in academic and political circles. In
Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ (2006), biographer Francis Wheen reiterates David
McLellan’s observation that since Marxism had not triumphed in the West,
"it had not been turned into an official ideology and is thus the object
of serious study unimpeded by government controls."
Biography
Karl
Heinrich Marx was born the third of seven children of a Jewish family in Trier, in the Kingdom
of Prussia’s Province of the Lower Rhine. His father Heinrich (1777–1838), who
had descended from a long line of rabbis, converted to Christianity, despite
his many deistic tendencies and his admiration of such Enlightenment figures as
Voltaire and Rousseau. Marx’s father was actually born Herschel Mordechai, but
when the Prussian authorities would not allow him to continue practicing law as
a Jew, he joined the official denomination of the Prussian state, Lutheranism,
which accorded him advantages, as one of a small minority of Lutherans in a
predominantly Roman Catholic region. His mother was Henrietta (née
Pressburg; 1788–1863); his siblings were Sophie, Hermann, Henriette,
Louise (m. Juta), Emilie and Caroline.
Education
Marx
was educated at home until the age of thirteen. After graduating from the Trier
Gymnasium, Marx enrolled in the University
of Bonn in 1835 at the
age of seventeen to study law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking
society and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a
result. Marx was interested in studying philosophy and literature, but his
father would not allow it because he did not believe that his son would be able
to comfortably support himself in the future as a scholar. The following year,
his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically
oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. During this period, Marx wrote many
poems and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from
his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity," but also absorbed
the atheistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians who were prominent in Berlin at the time. Marx
earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the
Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but he had to submit his
dissertation to the University of Jena as he was warned that his reputation among the
faculty as a Young Hegelian radical would lead to a poor reception in Berlin.
Marx and the Young Hegelians
The
Left, or Young Hegelians, consisted of a group of philosophers and journalists
circling around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer opposing their teacher Hegel.
Despite their criticism of Hegel’s metaphysical assumptions, they made use of
Hegel’s dialectical method, separated from its theological content, as a
powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some
members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and
post-Hegelian philosophy. One of them, Max Stirner, turned critically against
both Feuerbach and Bauer in his book "Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum"
(1845, The Ego and Its Own), calling these atheists "pious people"
for their reification of abstract concepts. Marx, at that time a follower of
Feuerbach, was deeply impressed by the work and abandoned Feuerbachian
materialism and accomplished what recent authors have denoted as an
"epistemological break." He developed the basic concept of historical
materialism against Stirner in his book "Die Deutsche Ideologie"
(1846, The German Ideology), which he did not publish. Another link to the
Young Hegelians was Moses Hess, with whom Marx eventually disagreed, yet to
whom he owed many of his insights into the relationship between state, society
and religion.
Towards
the end of October 1843, Marx arrived in Paris,
France. There,
on August 28, 1844, at the Café de la Régence on the Place du
Palais he began the most important friendship of his life, and one of the most
important in history – he met Friedrich Engels. Engels had come to Paris specifically to see
Marx, whom he had met only briefly at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung in
1842. He came to show Marx what would turn out to be perhaps Engels’ greatest
work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Paris at this time was the home and
headquarters to armies of German, British, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries.
Marx, for his part, had come to Paris to work
with Arnold Ruge, another revolutionary from Germany, on the
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher .
After
the failure of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx, living on
the Rue Vaneau, wrote for the most radical of all German newspapers in Paris, indeed in Europe,
the Vorwärts, established and run by the secret society called League of
the Just. Marx’s topics were generally on the Jewish question and Hegel. When
not writing, Marx studied the history of the French Revolution and read
Proudhon. He also spent considerable time studying a side of life he had never
been acquainted with before – a large urban proletariat.
"[Hitherto exposed mainly to university towns...] Marx’s sudden
espousal of the proletarian cause can be directly attributed (as can that of
other early German communists such as Weitling) to his first hand contacts with
socialist intellectuals [and books] in France."
He re-evaluated his
relationship with the Young Hegelians, and as a reply to Bauer’s atheism wrote
On the Jewish Question. This essay was mostly a critique of current notions of
civil and human rights and political emancipation, which also included several
critical references to Judaism as well as Christianity from a standpoint of
social emancipation. Engels, a committed communist, kindled Marx’s interest in
the situation of the working class and guided Marx’s interest in economics.
Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which remained unpublished
until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of
communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a
contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist
society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative
production.
In January 1845, after the
Vorwärts expressed its hearty approval regarding the assassination attempt
on the life of Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, Marx, among many others,
were ordered to leave Paris.
He and Engels moved on to Brussels,
Belgium.
Marx devoted himself to an
intensive study of history and elaborated on his idea of historical
materialism, particularly in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German
Ideology), the basic thesis of which was that "the nature of individuals
depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx
traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the
collapse of the present one—industrial capitalism—and its
replacement by communism. This was the first major work of what scholars consider
to be his later phase, abandoning the Feuerbach-influenced humanism of his
earlier work.
Next, Marx wrote The Poverty of
Philosophy (1847), a response to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The Philosophy of
Poverty and a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the
foundation for Marx and Engels’ most famous work, The Communist Manifesto,
first published on February 21, 1848, as the manifesto of the Communist League,
a small group of European communists who had come to be influenced by Marx and
Engels.
Later that year, Europe experienced tremendous revolutionary upheaval.
Marx was arrested and expelled from Belgium;
in the meantime a radical movement had seized power from King Louis-Philippe in
France, and invited Marx to
return to Paris,
where he witnessed the revolutionary June Days Uprising first hand.
When this collapsed in 1849,
Marx moved back to Cologne
and started the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish Newspaper").
During its existence he was put on trial twice, on February 7, 1849 because of
a press misdemeanor, and on the 8th charged with incitement to armed rebellion.
Both times he was acquitted. The paper was soon suppressed and Marx returned to
Paris, but was
forced out again. This time he sought refuge in London.
London
Marx
moved to London
in May 1849, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He briefly worked
as correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in 1851. In 1855, the Marx
family suffered a blow with the death of their son, Edgar, from tuberculosis.
Meanwhile, Marx’s major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857
he had produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property,
wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market. This work however
was not published until 1941, under the title Grundrisse. In the early 1860s he
worked on composing three large volumes, the Theories of Surplus Value, which
discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and
David Ricardo. This work, that was published posthumously under the editorship
of Karl Kautsky is often seen as the Fourth book of Capital, and constitutes
one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought. In
1867, well behind schedule, the first volume of Capital was published, a work
which analyzed the capitalist process of production. Here, Marx elaborated his
labor theory of value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation
which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the
collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts
upon which Marx continued to work for the rest of his life and were published
posthumously by Engels. In 1859, Marx was able to publish Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work. In his
journalistic work of this period, Marx championed the Union cause in the
American Civil War.
One
reason why Marx was so slow to publish Capital was that he was devoting his
time and energy to the First International, to whose General Council he was
elected at its inception in 1864. He was particularly active in preparing for
the annual Congresses of the International and leading the struggle against the
anarchist wing led by Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Although Marx won this
contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London
to New York
in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The
most important political event during the existence of the International was
the Paris Commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and
held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx
wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, an
enthusiastic defense of the Commune.
During
the last decade of his life, Marx’s health declined and he was incapable of the
sustained effort that had characterized his previous work. He did manage to
comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. In Germany, in his
Critique of the Gotha Programme, he opposed the tendency of his followers
Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) and August Bebel (1840–1913) to
compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a
united socialist party. In his correspondence with Vera Zasulich, Marx
contemplated the possibility of Russia’s
bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the
basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village Mir.
Family Life
Karl Marx was married to Jenny
von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron. Karl Marx’s
engagement to her was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed
by both the Marxes and Westphalens. Despite the objections, the two were
married on June 19, 1843 in
Kreuznacher Pauluskirche, Bad Kreuznach.
During the first half of the
1850s the Marx family lived in poverty and constant fear of creditors in a
three room flat on Dean Street
in the Soho quarter of London.
Marx and Jenny already had four children and three more were to follow. Of
these only three survived to adulthood. Marx’s major source of income at this
time was Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family
business in Manchester.
This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for
the New York Daily Tribune. Inheritances from one of Jenny’s uncles and her
mother who died in 1856 allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious
lodgings at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish
Town a new suburb on the
then-outskirts of London.
Marx generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his
resources, although this did extend to some spending on relatively bourgeois
luxuries, which he felt were necessities for his wife and children given their
social status and the mores of the time.
There is a disputed rumour that
Marx was the father of Frederick Demuth, the son of Marx’s housekeeper, Lenchen
Demuth. It has been suggested that this rumour lacks any direct corroboration.
Marx’s children by his wife were: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet;
1844–1883); Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1846–1911); Edgar
(1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy ("Guido"; 1849–1850); Jenny
Eveline Frances ("Franziska"; 1851–1852); Jenny Julia Eleanor
(1855–1898); and one more who died before being named (July 1857).
Death and Legacy
Following the death of his wife
Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health
for the last fifteen months of his life. It eventually brought on the
bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on March 14, 1883. He died a stateless
person and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London,
on 17 March 1883. The messages carved on Marx’s tombstone are: "WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE", the final line of The Communist Manifesto,
and Engels’ version of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach:"
"THE PHILOSOPHERS HAVE ONLY INTERPRETED THE WORLD IN VARIOUS WAYS -
THE POINT HOWEVER IS TO CHANGE IT"
The tombstone was a monument
built in 1954 by the Communist Party of Great Britain with a portrait bust by
Laurence Bradshaw; Marx’s original tomb had been humbly adorned. In 1970, there
was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the monument, with a homemade bomb.
Several of Marx’s closest
friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich
Engels. Engels’ speech included the words:
"On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three
in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left
alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair,
peacefully gone to sleep – but forever. "
In addition to Engels and
Liebknecht, Marx’s daughter Eleanor and Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue,
Marx’s two French socialist sons-in-law, also attended his funeral. Liebknecht,
a founder and leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, gave a speech in
German, and Longuet, a prominent figure in the French working-class movement,
gave a short statement in French. Two telegrams from workers’ parties in France and Spain were also read out. Together
with Engels’ speech, this was the entire programme of the funeral. Also
attending the funeral was Friedrich Lessner, who had been sentenced to three
years in prison at the Cologne communist trial of 1852; G. Lochner, who was
described by Engels as "an old member of the Communist League" and
Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester, a member of the Royal
Society, but also an old communist associate of Marx and Engels. Three others
attended the funeral – Ray Lankester, Sir John Noe and Leonard Church – making
eleven in all.
Marx’s daughter Eleanor became
a socialist like her father and helped edit his works.
Marx’s
Thought
The American Marx scholar Hal Draper once remarked, "there are few
thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by
Marxists and anti-Marxists alike." The legacy of Marx’s thought is
bitterly contested between numerous tendencies who claim to be Marx’s most
accurate interpreters, including Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and
libertarian Marxism.
Philosophy
Marx’s
philosophy hinges on his view of human nature. Along with the Hegelian
dialectic, Marx inherited a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant
human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting
"nature" with "history." Sometimes they use the phrase
"existence precedes consciousness." In either case, a person is
determined by where and when the person is – social context takes precedence
over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human
nature is adaptability. Nevertheless, Marxian thought rests on the fundamental
assumption that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this
process of transformation "labour" and the capacity to transform
nature "labour power." For Marx, this is a natural capacity for
physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the active role of human
consciousness:
"A spider conducts operations that resemble
those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame 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. "
(Capital, Vol. I, Chap.
7, Pt. 1)
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.
Marx’s
analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means / forces of
production, literally those things such as land, natural resources, and
technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the
relations of production, in other words, the social and technical 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.
Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the
relations 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. For Marx, different classes have divergent
interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Conflict
between social classes being something which is inherent in all human history:
"The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles. "
(The Communist Manifest,
Chapter 1)
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 the things that people produce,
commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans
and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and
circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social
relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of
production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are
mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the
market.
Commodity
fetishism is an example of what Engels 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,
but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels’ point was
not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; 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 form some truth about political relations. For example,
although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive
than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect (according
to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own
labor-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx’s understanding
of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface to his 1843 Contribution
to the Critique of Hegel’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 creature,
the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the
opium of the people. "
(Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)
Whereas
his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion
was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function in terms of
political and economic inequality. Moreover, he provides an analysis of the
ideological functions of religion: to reveal "an inverted consciousness of the world. "He continues: "It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service
of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms, once [religion,]
the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked". For Marx, this unholy self-estrangement, the "loss of man," is complete for the sphere of the proletariat. His final
conclusion is that for Germany,
general human emancipation is only possible as a suspension of private property
by the proletariat.
Political Economy
Marx
argued that this alienation of human work (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. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for
whatever work they do in a given period of time (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 power are "proletarians." The person
who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and
technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois".
The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.
Marx distinguished industrial
capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one market and
sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given
markets, there is often a difference between the price of a 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 input unit-costs are lower than output
unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued
that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour, the difference
between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce.
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 of 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-term consequence of this 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 would be required, because the ruling class would not give up power
without violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship
of the proletariat – a period where the needs of the working-class, not of
capital, will be the common deciding factor – must be created on a temporary
basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program",
"between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the
revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this
is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." While he allowed for the
possibility of peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic
institutional structures (e.g. Britain,
the US and the Netherlands), he suggested that in other
countries with strong centralized state-oriented traditions, like France and Germany, the "lever of our
revolution must be force."
Alleged Antisemitism
Scholars
are divided as to whether Marx was anti-Semitic. According to Edard Flannery,
Marx’s equation of Judaism with capitalism, together with his pronouncements on
Jews, strongly influenced socialist movements and shaped their attitudes and
policies toward the Jews. His essay influenced National Socialist, Soviet and
Arab anti-Semites.
Hyam
Maccoby has argued that Marx’s early anti-Semitism is shown in his 1843 essay
"On the Jewish Question." In it Marx argues that the modern
commercialized world is the triumph of Judaism, a pseudo-religion whose god is
money. Marx wrote:
Let
us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the
secret of his religion in the real Jew.
What
is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the
worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
Very
well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical,
real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.}}
Maccoby
has suggested that Marx was embarrassed by his Jewish background, noting
"that anyone who uses Jews as the yardstick of evil is being
antisemitic". In later years, Marx’ anti-Semitism was mostly limited to
private letters and conversations because his political enemies both on the
left (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin) and on the right (aristocracy
and the Church) "adopted antisemitism as their central doctrine".
Bernard Lewis found many instances of anti-Semitic language in later Marx’s
work.
In
contrast, David McLellan argued that "On the Jewish Question" must be
understood in terms of Marx´s debates with Bruno Bauer over the nature of
political emancipation in Germany.
According to McLellan, Marx used the word "Judentum" in its
colloquial sense of "commerce" to argue that that Germans suffer, and
must be emancipated from, capitalism. The second half of Marx´s essay,
McLellan concludes, should be read as "an extended pun at Bauer’s
expense.".
Francis
Wheen asserts: "Those critics who see this as a foretaste of Mein Kampf
overlook one essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude
stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defence of the Jews. It was a
retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full
civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians."
Hal
Draper has argued that Marx was influenced by the writing of Jewish critic
Moses Hess, and that "On the Jewish Question" should be read
alongside similar work by Hess:
It
is well known that the language of Marx’s Part II of On the Jewish
Question followed the view of the Jews’ role given in an essay On the
Money System just written by none other than Hess, and just read by Marx.
A
special case, near if not in the Young Hegelian tendency, was Moses Hess:
conscientiously Jewish himself, Hess had been brought up in an orthodox
household and later
became the progenitor of Zionism. Hess’s thesis was that present-day
society was a “huckster world", a "social animal-world",
in which people become fully developed "egoists", beasts of prey and
bloodsuckers. "The Jews", wrote
the father of Zionism, "who in the natural
history of the social animal-world had the world-historic mission of developing
the beast of prey out of humanity have now finally completed their
mission’s work. "It was in the
"Judeo-Christian huckster world" that "the mystery of the blood
of Christ, like the mystery of the ancient Jewish blood-worship, finally
appears quite unmasked as the mystery of the beast of prey." There is more
verbiage, going back to the "blood-cult" of ancient Judaism as the prototype of
modern society, and on to a condemnation of priests as the "hyenas of the social animal-world" who are as bad as
the other animal-people by virtue of their "common quality as beasts of
prey, as bloodsuckers, as Jews, as financial wolves".
Earlier
in 1843 Hess had published an important article on The Philosophy of Action,
which only incidentally remarked that "The Christian God is an imitation
of the Jewish Moloch-Jehovah, to whom the first-born were sacrificed to
‘propitiate’ him, and whom the juste-milieu age of Jewry bought off
with money…" Hess intended no special anti-Jewish animus in any of this
stuff, compared to which Marx’s approach is complimentary and drily
economic. Note that Judaism is criticized as part of the Judeo-Christian
complex, and not in order to praise Christianity – this being the same
pattern as Voltaire’s; although Hess saw no contradiction between his own
continued Jewish faith and loyalties and his opinion, expounded in his
writings, that Christianity was the more advanced, modern and "pure"
religion – all in the Feuerbachian groove.
Jonathan
Sacks has written that virtually all major enlightenment philosophers were
antisemitic, including Voltaire, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. At the time Marx
wrote "On the Jewish Question", the word "antisemitism" had
not yet been coined or developed a racial component, and there was little
awareness of the depths of European prejudice against Jews. Marx was thus
simply expressing commonplace thinking of his era. One of the first to
recognize the extreme dangers that European Jews faced and reform his thinking,
was Moses Hess and it was this that led him (40 years before the foundation of
Zionism) to call for Jews to create their own country.
Influences on Marx’s Thought
Marx’s
thought was strongly influenced by:
- The
dialectical method and historical orientation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel;
- The classical political economy of Adam
Smith and David Ricardo;
- French socialist and sociological
thought, in particular the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau;
- Earlier German materialism,
particularly Ludwig Feuerbach
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 in the eleventh of his Theses on
Feuerbach 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 alter the world. Consequently, most followers of Marx are not
fatalists, but activists who believe that revolutionaries must organize social
change.
Marx’s
view of history, which came to be called historical materialism
(controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels
and Lenin) is certainly influenced by Hegel’s claim that reality (and history)
should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that human history is
characterized by the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the
real (which was also a movement 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 – episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For
example, Hegel strongly opposed slavery in the United States during his lifetime,
and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would eliminate it from their
civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of 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 it upon its feet.
Marx’s
acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel’s
idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of
Christianity, Feuerbach 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 world 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 ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their
lives clearly.
The
other important contribution to Marx’s revision of Hegelianism was Engels’
book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to
conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the
modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution.
Marx’s Influence
The
work of Marx and Engels covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex
analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx
and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a grand, cohesive theoretical
outlook dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among
Marxists over how to interpret Marx’s writings and how to apply his concepts to
current events and conditions. Moreover, it is important to distinguish between
"Marxism" and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly
before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers’ leader Jules
Guesde, and to his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of
"revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of lack of faith in the working
class. After the French party split into a reformist and revolutionary party,
some accused Guesde (leader of the latter) of taking orders from Marx; Marx
remarked to Lafargue, "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist"
(in a letter to Engels, Marx later accused Guesde of being a
"Bakuninist").
Essentially, people use the
word "Marxist" to describe those who rely on Marx’s conceptual
language (e.g. "mode 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. Some, particularly in academic circles, who accept much
of Marx’s theory, but not all its implications, call themselves
"Marxian" instead.
Six years after Marx’s death, Engels
and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued
political activism. This organization was far more successful than the First
International had been, containing mass workers’ parties, particularly the
large and successful Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was
predominantly Marxist in outlook. This international collapsed in 1914,
however, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein’s
"evolutionary socialism", and in part because of divisions precipitated
by World War I.
World War I also led to the
Russian Revolution of 1917 in which a left splinter of the Second
International, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took power. The
revolution dynamized workers around the world into setting up their own section
of the Bolsheviks’ "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".
Marx believed that the
communist revolution would take place in advanced industrial societies such as
France, Germany and England, but Lenin argued that in the age of imperialism,
and due to the "law of uneven development", where Russia had on the
one hand, an antiquated agricultural society, but on the other hand, some of
the most up-to-date industrial concerns, the "chain" might break at
its weakest points, that is, in the so-called "backward" countries,
and ignite revolution in the advanced industrial societies of Europe, where
society is ready for socialism, and which could then come to the aid of the
workers state in Russia.
Marx and Engels make a very significant
comment in the preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto:
"Now
the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a
form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of
Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the
same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the
West?
The
only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes
the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement
each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the
starting point for a communist development."
(Marx and Engels,
Preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto)
Marx’s words served as a starting point for Lenin, who,
together with Trotsky, always understood that the Russian revolution must
become a "signal for a proletarian revolution in the West".
Supporters of Trotsky argue that the failure of revolution in the West along
the lines envisaged by Marx, to come to the aid of the Russian revolution after
1917, led to the rise of Stalinism, and set the cast of human history for
seventy years. This is termed the theory of the Permanent Revolution, which
became official policy in Russia
until Lenin’s death in 1924 and the subsequent development of the concept of
"Socialism in one country" by Stalin.
In
China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants
and not just workers could play leading roles in a Communist revolution, even
in third world countries marked by peasant feudalism in the absence of
industrial workers. Mao termed this the New Democratic Revolution. It was a
departure from Marx, who had stated that the revolutionary transformation of
society could take place only in countries that have achieved a capitalist stage
of development with a proletarian majority. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao
came to be internationally known as Maoism.
Under
Lenin, and particularly under Joseph Stalin, Soviet suppression of the rights
of individuals in the name of the struggle against capitalism, as well as
Stalinist purges themselves, came in the minds of many to be characteristic of
Marxism. This impression was encouraged by capitalism-oriented western states,
as well as the politics of the Cold War. There were, nonetheless, always
dissenting Marxist voices – Marxists of the old school of the Second
International, the left communists who split off from the Third International
shortly after its formation, and later Leon Trotsky and his followers, who set
up a "Fourth International" in 1938 to compete with that of Stalin,
claiming to represent true Bolshevism.
Coming
from the Second International milieu, in the 1920s and ’30s, a group of
dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among
them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a
group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School.
Their work is known as Critical Theory, a type of Marxist philosophy and
cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max
Weber.
The
Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists,
including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First, writing at the time
of the ascendance of Stalinism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional
Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier
Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly
influential, their work has been criticized by both orthodox Marxists and some
Marxists involved in political practice for divorcing Marxist theory from
practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise.
Influential
Marxists of the same period include the Third International’s Georg Lukacs and
Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt
School are often known by
the term Western Marxism.
In
1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press,
to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of the
Communist Party.
In
1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx’s thought as a coherent and
scientific theory of history by restating its central tenets in the language of
analytic philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic
movement which also included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell
Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy, as is the
Israeli Shlomo Avineri.
The
following countries had governments at some point in the twentieth century who
at least nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still do as of 2006):
Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua,
North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In addition, the
Indian states of Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal
have had Marxist governments.
Marxist
political parties and movements have significantly declined since the fall of
the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably Nepal.
Marx
was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart’s list of the most influential figures in
history.
In
July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner of the ‘Greatest Philosopher of All
Time’ poll by listeners of the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time.
Criticisms
Many
proponents of capitalism have argued that capitalism is a more effective means
of generating and redistributing wealth than socialism or communism, or that
the gulf between rich and poor that concerned Marx and Engels was a temporary
phenomenon. Some suggest that self-interest and the need to acquire capital is
an inherent component of human behavior, and is not caused by the adoption of
capitalism or any other specific economic system and that different economic
systems reflect different social responses to this fact. The Austrian School
of economics has criticized Marx’s use of the labour theory of value. In
addition, the political repression and economic problems of several historical
Communist states have done much to destroy Marx’s reputation in the Western
world, particularly following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of
the Soviet Union. Some Marxists argue that the
former USSR
was a variant of state capitalism whose collapse does not affect the veracity
of Marxism.
Friedrich
Hayek provided a reply to Marx; in The Road to Serfdom (1944) Hayek shows, or
attempts to show, that coordination problems in a socialist economy (the
prerequisite for the subsequent pure communism and "whithering away of the
state"), whether that socialist economy was democratically controlled or
under Leninist direction, would necessarily create bottlenecks as the
quasi-labor of "planning" replaces production for use. Followers of
Hayek point to the queues and shortages that result from planned rationing
(whether in Communist societies or wartime democracies such as Britain from
1939 to 1951) to demonstrate that in the short run, the socialist or Leninist
economy seizes up and creates unfairness.
An
intriguing critic of Marx, although he also paid tribute to many of Marx’s
basic ideas, was Louis Feuer, the late professor of philosophy at University of California,
Berkeley. In
his introduction to Selected Works on Economics and Politics by Karl Marx,
published in 1960, Feuer argued strongly for the viewpoint, also expressed by
others, that Marxism has many of the characteristics of a religion – in other
words, that Marxism largely depends upon a fervent kind of faith, not provable
scientifically, which is typical of religious believers. Just the same, Feuer
in his introdution, and in other works, pointed out that Marx has had a very
enduring and positive influence on the social and economic thinking of almost
every modern country, particularly in Western Europe, but also in the United States.
He made the interesting comment that Marxism largely depends upon the injection
of ethical thinking into economic and political analysis — in contrast to
modern trends which prefer to discuss these important areas in a totally
"objective" manner without ethical values.
Marx
has also been criticized from the Left. Some have argued that class is not the
most fundamental inequality in history and call attention to patriarchy or
race, as not being, as Marxists argue, dependent on class. It could however be
argued that Marx does not suggest that class divisions are more fundamental than
patriarchy, since the division between men and women, as Engels pointed out,
predates class divisions, but only that the movement of history can be best
understood in terms of class, and that class struggle is the mechanism of
change. Anarchists, on the other hand, have always opposed Marxism, even its
most libertarian forms, as being too authoritarian, and missing the basic
necessity of rebellion against authority by concentrating on economic matters.
(See also Anarchism and Marxism).
Some
today question the theoretical and historical validity of "class" as
an analytic construct or as a political actor. In this line, some question
Marx’s reliance on 19th century notions that linked science with the idea of
"progress" (see social evolution). Many observe that capitalism has
changed much since Marx’s time, and that class differences and relationships
are much more complex – citing as one example the fact that much corporate
stock in the United States
is owned by workers through pension funds. Critics of this analysis retort that
the top 1% of stock owners still own nearly 50% of the nation’s publicly traded
company stocks.
Still
others criticize Marx from the perspective of philosophy of science. Karl
Popper has criticized Marx’s theories for not being falsifiable, which he
believed rendered some aspects of Marx’s historical and socio-political
argument unscientific; Popper’s falsifiability standard has itself always been
controversial. Popper also criticized Marx for historicism, that is, a relativization
of truth to a particular historical period.
Some
argue that while socioeconomic gaps between the bourgeoisie and proletariat
remained, industrialization in countries such as the United
States and Great Britain also saw the rise of
a middle class not inclined to revolution, and of a welfare state that helped
contain any revolutionary tendencies among the working class. While the
economic devastation of the Great Depression broadened the appeal of Marxism in
the developed world, future government safeguards and economic recovery led to
a decline in its influence. In contrast, Marxism remained extremely influential
in feudal and industrially underdeveloped societies such as Czarist Russia,
where the Bolshevik Revolution was successful.
While
Marx and Engels focused almost exclusively on developments in the West
following the prospective development of capitalism, this left the problems of
the less developed nations, such as Russia, largely unaddressed. This
perceived problem with Marxist theory – that revolutions nevertheless took
place in less developed areas of the world, even rather more than within the
most advanced capitalist ones – was known from the beginning of the 20th
century, and much of the work of Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist and Marxian
authors and theorists became dedicated to addressing it. Trotsky famously
developed the theory of Permanent Revolution to show how revolutions in
backward countries like Russia
could succeed so long as they spread to the West. This was opposed by Stalin,
who argued for "Socialism in one country". In essence, Lenin argued,
taking the theory from several other contemporary Marxist writers, that through
imperialism the bourgeoisie of wealthy countries is using
"superprofits" from the imperial colonies to effectively bribe the
working class back home in order to appease it. Nevertheless, after the Russian
Revolution of 1917, Western capitalist nations did experience (unsuccessful)
revolutions more or less along the "proletarian" lines that Marx
envisaged, notably in Germany (1918, 1919, 1923), and Spain (leading to the
Spanish Civil War) with upheavals in France, Italy, and the UK (the general
strike of 1926) and elsewhere.
Critics
argue that the Soviet Union’s numerous
internal failings and subsequent collapse were a direct result of the practical
failings of Marxism. Most Marxists on the contrary claim that it was precisely
the abandonment of Marxism in the Soviet Union
that led to its demise, due to its isolation in a backward country not ripe for
socialism according to Marx. Marx saw more advanced modes of production as
growing out of mature capitalism, and needing widespread education and
democratic apparatuses to allow the eventual control of the state by the people
themselves (and eventually, the "withering away of the state" under a
truly mature communism) – only possible with a well educated and democratic
populace. Marx did not appear to suggest that a stage of economic development
could simply be skipped over, as the Soviet ideology implied. Rather, no nation
should realistically be able to achieve socialism (let alone a mature
communism) until it had developed a modern capitalist system, and mature
communism was supposed to require a level of wealth and technology that would
allow the basic material needs of all citizens to be produced with very little
labor, on average, per person in a given time period. That achievement would
then free people’s time and energies to fully participate in the democratic
running of society, and then to finally overcome the alienation that the
pattern of technological revolutions had caused throughout history—a
giant arc in which societies developed from the "primitive communism"
of small bands that had little or no structural inequality, through the great
agrarian empires (usually involving slavery at one end and the richest monarchs
at the other) which Marx considered to be the pinnacle of inequality, through
feudalism and capitalism to the socialist organisation of society in which all
can participate equally due to this technological development. The
"elites" of feudal and capitalist society become less able to
dominate others either through economics or ideology – their role in society is
finished – as the working class develops its strength and becomes the "gravedigger"
of capitalism.
Others,
like Shlomo Avineri, have argued that it was the pre-capitalist structure of
1917 Russia,
as well as the strong authoritarian traditions of the Russian state and its
weak civil society, which pushed the Soviet revolution towards its repressive
development.
Critics
have also claimed to have shown problems with the concept of historical
materialism. At the base of historical materialism, they claim, is the view
that the mode of production creates all historical events and changes. But
critics have asked the question `Where does the mode of production come from?’.
Murray Rothbard argues that "…Marx never attempts to provide an answer.
Indeed he cannot, since if he attributes the state of technology or
technological change to the actions of man, of individual men, his whole system
falls apart. For human consciousness, and individual consciousness at that,
would then be determining [the mode of production] rather than the other way
round." However, Marx’s famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy states "In the social production of their existence,
men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their
will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production." Marx clearly
attributes the productive forces and their development to the actions of human
beings, but emphasises the social nature of this development, based on
necessity, the need to maintain their existence, which thus develops
"independent of their will", as individuals, and thus impacts back on
the individual in ways which reflect the given social conditions.
Reference
- Shlomo Avineri, The Social and
Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1968) ISBN
0-521-09619-7
- Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment
(Oxford University Press, 1963) ISBN 0-195-20052-7
- G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of
History: A Defence (Princeton University Press, 1978) ISBN 0-691-07068-7
- Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of
Revolution (4 volumes) Monthly Review Press
- Ronald Duncan & Colin Wilson,
(editors) Marx Refuted, (Bath, UK, 1987) ISBN 0-906798-71-X
- Stephen Jay Gould, A Darwinian
Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral – E. Ray Lankester, Page 1, Find Articles.com
(1999)
- Daniel Little, The Scientific Marx,
(University of Minnesota Press, 1986) ISBN 0-8166-1505-5
- David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and
Thought (Harpercollins, 1978) ISBN 0-060-90585-9
- Boris Nicolaevsky & Otto
Maenchen-Helfen (translator), Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (Penguin Books, 1976)
ISBN 0-140-21594-8
- Murray
Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought Volume II:
Classical Economics (Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 1995) ISBN 0-945466-
48-X
- Maximilien Rubel, Marx Without Myth: A
Chronological Study of his Life and Work (Blackwell, 1975) ISBN 0-631-15780-8
- Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life,
(Fourth Estate, 1999), ISBN 1-85702-637-3
- Francis Wheen, Marx’s Das Kapital,
(Atlantic Books, 2006) ISBN 1-843-54400-8
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