Influences on Karl Marx
Encyclopedia
Influences on Karl Marx are commonly referred to as deriving from three sources: German idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English & Scottish political economy. Although this "three sources" model is an oversimplification, it still has some measure of truth.
is believed to have had the greatest influence of any philosopher of modern times. Kantian philosophy
was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built - particularly as it was developed by Hegel. Hegel's dialectical method, which was taken up by Karl Marx, was an extension of the method of reasoning by “antinomies” that Kant used.
, by the time of his death, was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. His views were widely taught, and his students were highly regarded. His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. Theologically and politically the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. They emphasized the compatibility between Hegel's philosophy and Christianity. Politically, they were orthodox. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer
, Friedrich Engels
, and Marx. They were often referred to as the Young Hegelians
.
Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism
, is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in 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 radically 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 summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
:
In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure
. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism
, and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism
.
) saw in Feuerbach's emphasis on people and human needs a movement toward a materialistic interpretation of society.
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. However 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.
What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's humanism
as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in The German Ideology
(1846):
Also, in his Theses on Feuerbach
(1844), he writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it". This opposition between, firstly, various subjective interpretations given by philosophers, which may be, in a sense, compared with Weltanschauung designed to legitimize the current state of affairs, and, secondly, the effective transformation of the world through praxis
, which combines theory and practice in a materialist way, is what distinguishes "Marxist philosophers" from the rest of philosophers. Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy; Louis Althusser
, founder of "Structural Marxism
" in the 1960s, would define it as "class struggle
in theory
". Marx's movement away from university philosophy and towards the workers' movement is thus inextricably linked to his rupture with his earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators to speak of a "young Marx
" and a "mature Marx", although the nature of this cut poses problems. A year before the Revolutions of 1848
, Marx and Engels thus wrote The Communist Manifesto
, which was prepared to an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!
". However, Marx's thought changed again following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte
's December 2, 1851 coup, which put an end to the French Second Republic
and created the Second Empire which would last until the 1870 Franco-Prussian War
. Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and would latter arrive to his theory of commodity fetishism
, exposed in the first chapter of the first book of Das Kapital
(1867). This abandonment of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed, several Marxist theorists, including Marxist humanists such as the Praxis School
, would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the "epistemological break" between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society.
, a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians
to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. From 1841, the young Marx
progressively broke away from German idealism
and the Young Hegelians. Along with Engels, who observed the Chartist movement in the United Kingdom
, he cut away with the environment in which he grew up and encountered the proletariat
in France and Germany.
He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family" (1845), and The German Ideology
(1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also Max Stirner
's The Ego and Its Own
(1844), considered as one of the founding book of individualist anarchism
. Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently alienating
, and that replacing God by the Humanity, as did Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity
(1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the Nation
, or even the Revolution
alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized Proudhon, whom had become famous with his cry "Property is theft!
", in The Poverty of Philosophy
(1845).
Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of Feuerbach. His theory of alienation
, developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
(published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the "human nature
"). But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had point out, and explained that the alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature
in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion
into the essence of man (menschliche Wesen, human nature). But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual subject
, as did classic philosophy, including contractualism
(Hobbes, Locke
and Rousseau) but also political economy
, Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and all which constitute our human existence. He claimed that individualism
was an essence the result of commodity fetishism
or alienation. Although some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism
which destroyed the possibility of free will
, Marx's philosophy in no way can be reduced
to such determinism, as his own personal trajectory makes clear.
In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation
), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of political economy
. He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung
on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy.
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predates the 20th century division of the two disciplines of politics
and economics
, treating social relations and economic relations as interwoven. Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists.
came the idea that the grounds of property is labour.
Marx critiqued Smith and Ricardo for not realizing that their economic concepts reflected specifically capitalist institutions, not innate natural properties of human society, and could not be applied unchanged to all societies. He proposed a systematic correlation between labour-values and money prices. He claimed that the source of profits under capitalism is value added by workers not paid out in wages. This mechanism operated through the distinction between "labour power", which workers freely exchanged for their wages, and "labour", over which asset-holding capitalists thereby gained control.
This practical and theoretical distinction was Marx's primary insight, and allowed him to develop the concept of "surplus value", which distinguished his works from that of Adam Smith
and David Ricardo
. Workers create enough value during a short period of the working day to pay their wages for that day (necessary labour); however, they continue to work for several more hours and continue to create value (surplus labour
). This value is not returned to them but appropriated by the capitalists. Thus, it is not the capitalist ruling class that creates wealth, but the workers, the capitalists then appropriating this wealth to themselves. (Some of Marx's insights were seen in a rudimentary form by the "Ricardian socialist" school http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/utopia.htm http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/ricardian.htm.) He developed this theory of exploitation in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a "dialectical" investigation into the forms value relations take.
Marx's theory of business cycles; of economic growth and development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of profit, or crisis theory
, are other important elements of Marx's political economy. Marx later made tentative movements towards econometric investigations of his ideas, but the necessary statistical
techniques of national accounting only emerged in the following century. In any case, it has proved difficult to adapt Marx's economic concepts, which refer to social relations, to measurable aggregated stocks and flows. In recent decades, however, a loose "quantitative" school of Marxist economists
has emerged. While it may be impossible to find exact measures of Marx's variables from price data, approximations of basic trends are possible.
, and therefore is sometimes considered a forebear of modern socialism
and communism
, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings. He argued that the goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, regardless of the will of the majority. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau
came the idea of egalitarian democracy.
and the followers of Saint-Simon
. Fourier wanted to replace modern cities with utopian communities, while the Saint-Simonians advocated directing the economy by manipulating credit. Although these programs didn’t have much support, they did expand the political and social imagination of their contemporaries, including Marx.
is perhaps best known for originating the social principle, later adopted by Marx, of how labor and income should be distributed: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
participated in the February 1848 uprising and the composition of what he termed "the first republican proclamation" of the new republic. But he had misgivings about the new government because it was pursuing political reform at the expense of the socio-economic reform, which Proudhon considered basic. Proudhon published his own perspective for reform, Solution du problème social, in which he laid out a program of mutual financial cooperation among workers. He believed this would transfer control of economic relations from capitalists and financiers to workers. It was Proudhon's book What is Property?
that convinced the young Karl Marx that private property
should be abolished.
In one of his first works, The Holy Family, Marx said, "Not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat." Marx, however, disagreed with Proudhon's anarchism and later published vicious criticisms of Proudhon. Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy
as a refutation of Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty. In his socialism, Proudhon was followed by Mikhail Bakunin
. After Bakunin's death, his libertarian socialism
diverged into anarchist communism
and collectivist anarchism
, with notable proponents such as Peter Kropotkin
and Joseph Déjacque
.
was also influenced by 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. Thereafter Engels and Marx worked together for the rest of Marx's life, so that the collected works of Marx and Engels are generally published together, almost as if the output of one person. Important publications, such as the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, were joint efforts. Engels says "I cannot deny that both before and during my 40 years’ collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundation of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration." But he adds
(to whom Marx dedicated his thesis, ‘’Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus’’, 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen
which opened up a realm of liberty.
and his social evolution
theory. He wrote a collection of notebooks from his reading of Lewis Morgan but they are regarded as being quite obscure and only available in scholarly editions.
propounded a cyclical theory
of history, according to which human societies progress through a series of stages from barbarism to civilization and then return to barbarism. In the first stage (called the Age of the Gods) religion, the family, and other basic institutions emerge; in the succeeding Age of Heroes, the common people are kept in subjection by a dominant class of nobles; in the final stage (the Age of Men) the people rebel and win equality, but in the process society begins to disintegrate. The connection between Vico's theory of history, and Marx's account of the evolution of society is apparent.
The Origin of Species
and recognized its value in supporting his theory of class struggle. He sent Darwin a personally inscribed copy of Das Kapital
in 1873 and had a dedication in the German version: "In deep appreciation - for Charles Darwin".
Marx understood that Darwin's work both helped to explain the internal struggles of human society, and provided a material explanation for the processes of nature. In 1861, Karl Marx wrote to his friend Ferdinand Lassalle
, "Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. ... Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained."
Having read Darwin's work and mentioned Darwin by name in Das Kapital
, it is presumable that Marx may have been influenced to some degree by Darwin.
of religious fundamentalists who seek to paint Darwin's ideas as incredibly dangerous. There is no
mention of Darwin or evolution in The Communist Manifesto
-- not surprising, since Darwin's
On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, 11 years later—and the only reference to Darwin
in Das Kapital
amounts to short footnotes on technological specialization in manufacturing
and industry.
Despite this, in The Disasters Darwinism Brought to Humanity, Harun Yahya (a Muslim creationist) writes: "Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, adapted Darwin's ideas, which deeply influenced him, to the dialectic process of history." Yahya also writes: "Marx revealed his sympathy for Darwin by dedicating his most important work, Das Kapital, to him."
This last bit is a common misconception that arose from a letter from Darwin to Edward Aveling
,
(who later became the lover of Marx's daughter, Eleanor
). Aveling had written to Darwin about wanting to dedicate
his book to him, but Darwin declined and Darwin's response became mixed with Karl Marx's papers when Eleanor
Marx inherited her father's papers from Engels
. The letter was published in 1931 in the Russian Communist
magazine, Under the Banner of Marxism, which went on to suggest that the enclosures referred to in the
letter might have been chapters from Das Kapital that dealt with evolution. It was not until 1975
that Aveling's letter to Darwin was discovered, debunking this myth.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
is believed to have had the greatest influence of any philosopher of modern times. Kantian philosophy
Kantianism
Kantianism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher born in Königsberg, Prussia . The term Kantianism or Kantian is sometimes also used to describe contemporary positions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics.-Ethics:Kantian ethics are deontological, revolving entirely...
was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built - particularly as it was developed by Hegel. Hegel's dialectical method, which was taken up by Karl Marx, was an extension of the method of reasoning by “antinomies” that Kant used.
G. W. F. Hegel
G. W. F. HegelGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
, by the time of his death, was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. His views were widely taught, and his students were highly regarded. His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. Theologically and politically the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. They emphasized the compatibility between Hegel's philosophy and Christianity. Politically, they were orthodox. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and historian. As a student of GWF Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism...
, Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
, and Marx. They were often referred to as the Young Hegelians
Young Hegelians
The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians, were a group of Prussian intellectuals who in the decade or so after the death of Hegel in 1831, wrote and responded to his ambiguous legacy...
.
Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism
Historical materialism
Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans...
, is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in 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 radically 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 summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is a book by Karl Marx, first published in 1859. The book is mainly an analysis of capitalism, achieved by critiquing the writings of the leading theoretical exponents of capitalism at that time: these were the political economists, nowadays often...
:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of productionRelations of productionRelations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of productionMode of productionIn the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production is a specific combination of:...
of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure
Base and superstructure
In Marxist theory, human society consists of two parts: the base and superstructure; the base comprehends the forces and relations of production — employer-employee work conditions, the technical division of labour, and property relations — into which people enter to produce the necessities and...
. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism
Feudalism
Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...
, and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Feuerbach was a German philosopher and anthropologist. According to Feuerbach, social and political thought should take as their foundation people and their material needs. He held that an individual is the product of their environment, that the whole consciousness of a person is the result of the interaction of sensory organs and the external world. Marx (and EngelsFriedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
) saw in Feuerbach's emphasis on people and human needs a movement toward a materialistic interpretation of society.
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. However 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.
What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in The German Ideology
The German Ideology
The German Ideology is a book written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher. However, the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow...
(1846):
In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
Also, in his Theses on Feuerbach
Theses on Feuerbach
The "Theses on Feuerbach" are eleven short philosophical notes written by Karl Marx in 1845. They outline a critique of the ideas of Marx's fellow Young Hegelian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach...
(1844), he writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it". This opposition between, firstly, various subjective interpretations given by philosophers, which may be, in a sense, compared with Weltanschauung designed to legitimize the current state of affairs, and, secondly, the effective transformation of the world through praxis
Praxis
Praxis is the putting of theory into practice. The term may refer to:* Christian theological praxis* Praxis , the practice of faith, especially worship* The Praxis School, a school of Marxist philosophy...
, which combines theory and practice in a materialist way, is what distinguishes "Marxist philosophers" from the rest of philosophers. Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy; Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
, founder of "Structural Marxism
Structural Marxism
Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and...
" in the 1960s, would define it as "class struggle
Class struggle
Class struggle is the active expression of a class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle"....
in theory
Theory
The English word theory was derived from a technical term in Ancient Greek philosophy. The word theoria, , meant "a looking at, viewing, beholding", and referring to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action...
". Marx's movement away from university philosophy and towards the workers' movement is thus inextricably linked to his rupture with his earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators to speak of a "young Marx
Young Marx
Some theorists consider Karl Marx's thought to be divided into a "young" period and a "mature" one. There is disagreement to when Marx's thought began to mature, and the problem of the idea of a "Young Marx" is the problem of tracking the development of Marx's works and of its possible unity...
" and a "mature Marx", although the nature of this cut poses problems. A year before the Revolutions of 1848
Revolutions of 1848
The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It was the first Europe-wide collapse of traditional authority, but within a year reactionary...
, Marx and Engels thus wrote The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto, originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party is a short 1848 publication written by the German Marxist political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the...
, which was prepared to an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!
Workers of the world, unite!
The political slogan Workers of the world, unite! is one of the most famous rallying cries of communism, found in The Communist Manifesto , by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
". However, Marx's thought changed again following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte
Louis Napoleon may refer to:* Louis Bonaparte or Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, , King Louis I of Holland, brother of Napoleon I* Napoléon Louis Bonaparte , King Louis II of Holland, second son of Louis Bonaparte...
's December 2, 1851 coup, which put an end to the French Second Republic
French Second Republic
The French Second Republic was the republican government of France between the 1848 Revolution and the coup by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte which initiated the Second Empire. It officially adopted the motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité...
and created the Second Empire which would last until the 1870 Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...
. Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and would latter arrive to his theory of commodity fetishism
Commodity fetishism
In Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things .The...
, exposed in the first chapter of the first book of Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
(1867). This abandonment of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed, several Marxist theorists, including Marxist humanists such as the Praxis School
Praxis School
The Praxis school was a Marxist humanist philosophical movement. It originated in Zagreb and Belgrade in the SFR Yugoslavia, during the 1960s.Prominent figures among the school's founders include Gajo Petrović and Milan Kangrga of Zagreb and Mihailo Marković of Belgrade...
, would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the "epistemological break" between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society.
The rupture with German Idealism and the Young Hegelians
Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno BauerBruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and historian. As a student of GWF Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism...
, a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians
Young Hegelians
The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians, were a group of Prussian intellectuals who in the decade or so after the death of Hegel in 1831, wrote and responded to his ambiguous legacy...
to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. From 1841, the young Marx
Young Marx
Some theorists consider Karl Marx's thought to be divided into a "young" period and a "mature" one. There is disagreement to when Marx's thought began to mature, and the problem of the idea of a "Young Marx" is the problem of tracking the development of Marx's works and of its possible unity...
progressively broke away from German idealism
German idealism
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...
and the Young Hegelians. Along with Engels, who observed the Chartist movement in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the formal name of the United Kingdom during the period when what is now the Republic of Ireland formed a part of it....
, he cut away with the environment in which he grew up and encountered the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
in France and Germany.
He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family" (1845), and The German Ideology
The German Ideology
The German Ideology is a book written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher. However, the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow...
(1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also Max Stirner
Max Stirner
Johann Kaspar Schmidt , better known as Max Stirner , was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism...
's The Ego and Its Own
The Ego and Its Own
The Ego and Its Own is a philosophical work by German philosopher Max Stirner . This work was first published in 1845, although with a stated publication date of "1844" to confuse the Prussian censors.-Content:...
(1844), considered as one of the founding book of individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism
Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought within the anarchist movement that emphasize the individual and his or her will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions, and ideological systems. Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy but refers to a...
. Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently alienating
Social alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
, and that replacing God by the Humanity, as did Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity
The Essence of Christianity
The Essence of Christianity is a book written by Ludwig Feuerbach and first published in 1841. It explains Feuerbach's philosophy and critique of religion. Feuerbach's theory of alienation would later be used by Karl Marx.- Influence :...
(1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the Nation
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
, or even the Revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized Proudhon, whom had become famous with his cry "Property is theft!
Property is theft!
Property is theft! is a slogan coined by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government....
", in The Poverty of Philosophy
The Poverty of Philosophy
Misère de la philosophie, German title Das Elend der Philosophie, English title The Poverty of Philosophy, is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile in 1843-1849...
(1845).
Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of Feuerbach. His theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
, developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx. Not published by Marx during his lifetime, they were first released in 1927 by researchers in the Soviet Union.The notebooks are an early expression of Marx's analysis of...
(published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the "human nature
Human nature
Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally....
"). But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had point out, and explained that the alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature
Marx's theory of human nature
Marx's theory of human nature occupies an important place in his critique of capitalism, his conception of communism, and his 'materialist conception of history'. Marx, however, does not refer to "human nature" as such, but to Gattungswesen, which is generally translated as 'species-being' or...
in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
into the essence of man (menschliche Wesen, human nature). But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual subject
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...
, as did classic philosophy, including contractualism
Contractualism
Contractualism can refer to two different positions. First, it can to refer to moral theories based on social contract theory, also known as contractarianism, which argue that what people ought to do is determined by contracts or agreements reached between those people. Second, the term was used by...
(Hobbes, Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
and Rousseau) but also political economy
Political economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
, Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and all which constitute our human existence. He claimed that individualism
Individualism
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own...
was an essence the result of commodity fetishism
Commodity fetishism
In Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things .The...
or alienation. Although some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism
Social determinism
Social determinism is the hypothesis that social interactions and constructs alone determine individual behavior ....
which destroyed the possibility of free will
Free will
"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
, Marx's philosophy in no way can be reduced
Reductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...
to such determinism, as his own personal trajectory makes clear.
In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx. Not published by Marx during his lifetime, they were first released in 1927 by researchers in the Soviet Union.The notebooks are an early expression of Marx's analysis of...
", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of political economy
Political economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
. He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung
Rheinische Zeitung
The Rheinische Zeitung was a 19th-century German newspaper, edited most famously by Karl Marx.The paper was founded on January 1, 1842 with a reformist pro-democracy editorial slant, providing an outlet for the Rhine region's middle-class and intellectuals, who were increasingly opposed to...
on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy.
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English and Scottish political economy
Political economyPolitical economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
predates the 20th century division of the two disciplines of politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
and economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
, treating social relations and economic relations as interwoven. Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists.
Adam Smith and David Ricardo
From Adam SmithAdam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
came the idea that the grounds of property is labour.
Marx critiqued Smith and Ricardo for not realizing that their economic concepts reflected specifically capitalist institutions, not innate natural properties of human society, and could not be applied unchanged to all societies. He proposed a systematic correlation between labour-values and money prices. He claimed that the source of profits under capitalism is value added by workers not paid out in wages. This mechanism operated through the distinction between "labour power", which workers freely exchanged for their wages, and "labour", over which asset-holding capitalists thereby gained control.
This practical and theoretical distinction was Marx's primary insight, and allowed him to develop the concept of "surplus value", which distinguished his works from that of Adam Smith
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
and David Ricardo
David Ricardo
David Ricardo was an English political economist, often credited with systematising economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. He was also a member of Parliament, businessman, financier and speculator,...
. Workers create enough value during a short period of the working day to pay their wages for that day (necessary labour); however, they continue to work for several more hours and continue to create value (surplus labour
Surplus labour
Surplus labour is a concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It means labour performed in excess of the labour necessary to produce the means of livelihood of the worker . According to Marxian economics, surplus labour is usually "unpaid labour"...
). This value is not returned to them but appropriated by the capitalists. Thus, it is not the capitalist ruling class that creates wealth, but the workers, the capitalists then appropriating this wealth to themselves. (Some of Marx's insights were seen in a rudimentary form by the "Ricardian socialist" school http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/utopia.htm http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/ricardian.htm.) He developed this theory of exploitation in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a "dialectical" investigation into the forms value relations take.
Marx's theory of business cycles; of economic growth and development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of profit, or crisis theory
Crisis theory
Crisis theory is generally associated with Marxian economics. In this context crisis refers to what is called, even currently and outside Marxian theory in many European countries a "conjuncture" or especially sharp bust cycle of the regular boom and bust pattern of what Marxists term "chaotic"...
, are other important elements of Marx's political economy. Marx later made tentative movements towards econometric investigations of his ideas, but the necessary statistical
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
techniques of national accounting only emerged in the following century. In any case, it has proved difficult to adapt Marx's economic concepts, which refer to social relations, to measurable aggregated stocks and flows. In recent decades, however, a loose "quantitative" school of Marxist economists
Marxian economics
Marxian economics refers to economic theories on the functioning of capitalism based on the works of Karl Marx. Adherents of Marxian economics, particularly in academia, distinguish it from Marxism as a political ideology and sociological theory, arguing that Marx's approach to understanding the...
has emerged. While it may be impossible to find exact measures of Marx's variables from price data, approximations of basic trends are possible.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private propertyPrivate property
Private property is the right of persons and firms to obtain, own, control, employ, dispose of, and bequeath land, capital, and other forms of property. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which refers to assets owned by a state, community or government rather than by...
, and therefore is sometimes considered a forebear of modern socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
and communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings. He argued that the goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, regardless of the will of the majority. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
came the idea of egalitarian democracy.
Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon
In 1833 France was experiencing a number of social problems arising out of the Industrial Revolution. A number of sweeping plans of reform were developed by thinkers on the left. Among the more grandiose were the plans of Charles FourierCharles Fourier
François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society...
and the followers of Saint-Simon
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon was a French early socialist theorist whose thought influenced the foundations of various 19th century philosophies; perhaps most notably Marxism, positivism and the discipline of sociology...
. Fourier wanted to replace modern cities with utopian communities, while the Saint-Simonians advocated directing the economy by manipulating credit. Although these programs didn’t have much support, they did expand the political and social imagination of their contemporaries, including Marx.
Louis Blanc
Louis BlancLouis Blanc
Louis Jean Joseph Charles Blanc was a French politician and historian. A socialist who favored reforms, he called for the creation of cooperatives in order to guarantee employment for the urban poor....
is perhaps best known for originating the social principle, later adopted by Marx, of how labor and income should be distributed: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph ProudhonPierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French politician, mutualist philosopher and socialist. He was a member of the French Parliament, and he was the first person to call himself an "anarchist". He is considered among the most influential theorists and organisers of anarchism...
participated in the February 1848 uprising and the composition of what he termed "the first republican proclamation" of the new republic. But he had misgivings about the new government because it was pursuing political reform at the expense of the socio-economic reform, which Proudhon considered basic. Proudhon published his own perspective for reform, Solution du problème social, in which he laid out a program of mutual financial cooperation among workers. He believed this would transfer control of economic relations from capitalists and financiers to workers. It was Proudhon's book What is Property?
What Is Property?
What Is Property?: or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government is an influential work of nonfiction on the concept of property and its relation to anarchist philosophy by the French anarchist and mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, first published in 1840.In the book, Proudhon most...
that convinced the young Karl Marx that private property
Private property
Private property is the right of persons and firms to obtain, own, control, employ, dispose of, and bequeath land, capital, and other forms of property. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which refers to assets owned by a state, community or government rather than by...
should be abolished.
In one of his first works, The Holy Family, Marx said, "Not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat." Marx, however, disagreed with Proudhon's anarchism and later published vicious criticisms of Proudhon. Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy
The Poverty of Philosophy
Misère de la philosophie, German title Das Elend der Philosophie, English title The Poverty of Philosophy, is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile in 1843-1849...
as a refutation of Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty. In his socialism, Proudhon was followed by Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...
. After Bakunin's death, his libertarian socialism
Libertarian socialism
Libertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property in the means of production...
diverged into anarchist communism
Anarchist communism
Anarchist communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with...
and collectivist anarchism
Collectivist anarchism
Collectivist anarchism is a revolutionary doctrine that advocates the abolition of both the state and private ownership of the means of production...
, with notable proponents such as Peter Kropotkin
Peter Kropotkin
Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, economist, geographer, author and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between...
and Joseph Déjacque
Joseph Déjacque
Joseph Déjacque was a French anarcho-communist poet and writer. He sought to abolish "personal property, property in land, buildings, workshops, shops, property in anything that is an instrument of work, production or consumption."Déjacque was the first to employ the term libertarian in a...
.
Engels
Marx's revision of HegelianismHegelianism
Hegelianism is a collective term for schools of thought following or referring to G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy which can be summed up by the dictum that "the rational alone is real", which means that all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories...
was also influenced by 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. Thereafter Engels and Marx worked together for the rest of Marx's life, so that the collected works of Marx and Engels are generally published together, almost as if the output of one person. Important publications, such as the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, were joint efforts. Engels says "I cannot deny that both before and during my 40 years’ collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the foundation of the theory, and more particularly in its elaboration." But he adds
Antique materialism
Marx was influenced by Antique materialism, especially EpicurusEpicurus
Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works...
(to whom Marx dedicated his thesis, ‘’Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus’’, 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen
Clinamen
Clinamen is the Latin name Lucretius gave to the unpredictable swerve of atoms, in order to defend the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus.According to Lucretius, the unpredictable swerve occurs "at no fixed place or time":...
which opened up a realm of liberty.
Lewis Morgan
Marx drew on Lewis H. MorganLewis H. Morgan
Lewis Henry Morgan was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist, a railroad lawyer and capitalist. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois...
and his social evolution
Social evolution
Social evolution is a subdiscipline of evolutionary biology that is concerned with social behaviors that have fitness consequences for individuals other than the actor...
theory. He wrote a collection of notebooks from his reading of Lewis Morgan but they are regarded as being quite obscure and only available in scholarly editions.
Giambattista Vico
Giambattista VicoGiambattista Vico
Giovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....
propounded a cyclical theory
Cyclical theory
The cyclical theory refers to a model used by historian Arthur Schlesinger to attempt to explicate the fluctuations in politics throughout American History. Liberalism and conservatism are rooted in the “national mood” that shows a continuing shift in national involvement between public purpose and...
of history, according to which human societies progress through a series of stages from barbarism to civilization and then return to barbarism. In the first stage (called the Age of the Gods) religion, the family, and other basic institutions emerge; in the succeeding Age of Heroes, the common people are kept in subjection by a dominant class of nobles; in the final stage (the Age of Men) the people rebel and win equality, but in the process society begins to disintegrate. The connection between Vico's theory of history, and Marx's account of the evolution of society is apparent.
Charles Darwin
Marx read Darwin'sCharles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
The Origin of Species
The Origin of Species
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the...
and recognized its value in supporting his theory of class struggle. He sent Darwin a personally inscribed copy of Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
in 1873 and had a dedication in the German version: "In deep appreciation - for Charles Darwin".
Marx understood that Darwin's work both helped to explain the internal struggles of human society, and provided a material explanation for the processes of nature. In 1861, Karl Marx wrote to his friend Ferdinand Lassalle
Ferdinand Lassalle
Ferdinand Lassalle was a German-Jewish jurist and socialist political activist.-Early life:Ferdinand Lassalle was born on 11 April 1825 in Breslau , Silesia to a prosperous Jewish family descending from Upper Silesian Loslau...
, "Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. ... Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained."
Having read Darwin's work and mentioned Darwin by name in Das Kapital
, it is presumable that Marx may have been influenced to some degree by Darwin.
Exaggeration of Darwin's Influence
However, the depth of the influence, if any, would certainly seem to be greatly exaggerated by a numberof religious fundamentalists who seek to paint Darwin's ideas as incredibly dangerous. There is no
mention of Darwin or evolution in The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto, originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party is a short 1848 publication written by the German Marxist political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the...
-- not surprising, since Darwin's
On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, 11 years later—and the only reference to Darwin
in Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
amounts to short footnotes on technological specialization in manufacturing
and industry.
Despite this, in The Disasters Darwinism Brought to Humanity, Harun Yahya (a Muslim creationist) writes: "Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, adapted Darwin's ideas, which deeply influenced him, to the dialectic process of history." Yahya also writes: "Marx revealed his sympathy for Darwin by dedicating his most important work, Das Kapital, to him."
This last bit is a common misconception that arose from a letter from Darwin to Edward Aveling
Edward Aveling
Edward Bibbins Aveling was a prominent English biology instructor and popular spokesman for Darwinian evolution and atheism. He later met and moved in with Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx and became a socialist activist...
,
(who later became the lover of Marx's daughter, Eleanor
Eleanor Marx
Jenny Julia Eleanor "Tussy" Marx , also known as Eleanor Marx Aveling, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a socialist activist, who sometimes worked as a literary translator...
). Aveling had written to Darwin about wanting to dedicate
his book to him, but Darwin declined and Darwin's response became mixed with Karl Marx's papers when Eleanor
Marx inherited her father's papers from Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
. The letter was published in 1931 in the Russian Communist
magazine, Under the Banner of Marxism, which went on to suggest that the enclosures referred to in the
letter might have been chapters from Das Kapital that dealt with evolution. It was not until 1975
that Aveling's letter to Darwin was discovered, debunking this myth.