Karl Marx

Karl Marx

(1818 – 1883)

German philosopher, economist, historian and socialist revolutionary thinker. He is one of the most influential thinkers in human history and his critique of capitalism paved the way for revolutionary movements in the 20th century.

He was influenced by the philosophy of Hegel and was a member of the left-leaning Young Hegelians, who followed a more radical interpretation of Hegel, particularly focusing on social and political issues. He believed that the aim of philosophy is not only to interpret the world, but to offer real possibilities of change.

His view of history is called historical materialism. Like Hegel, Marx saw the history of humanity, as well as of individual human beings, as being in a perpetual journey of self-development. However, he discarded the spiritual side of Hegel’s idealism (the metaphysical and teleological ideas) and instead focused on how people as subjects relate to the material world around them, particularly the objects they created with their own labour.

In the Communist Manifesto (1848), he wrote extensively on the condition of alienation (the subject being split from the object) which estranges people from their own human nature and strives to be resolved. He discussed alienation in a number of contemporary manifestations such as alienation from nature, social alienation and self-alienation. One of his most famous and philosophically original ideas is his development on the alienation of labour.

According to him, it is in the nature of human beings to be creative and produce objects. That is, it is a natural urge that comes out of necessity. In turn, the objects we produce through our own work reflect back on us. The condition of alienation results when there is a wedge between a person and the fruits of their work, the causes of which which Marx identified in complex historical and social forces. According to him, among all social and economic systems, capitalism produced the most intense forms of alienated labour, which can be seen in many ways:

  • the work a person performs is not the expression of a natural creative need, but by the necessity to fulfil other needs (for example economic needs – you work to pay for rent and food)
  • if the product a person creates is for the profit of another person
  • if the product doesn’t fulfil any real human needs, but only desires of greed
  • if the working process is a fragmented (as was later the case with the Ford assembly line for example) and a person only creates a fraction of the finished product, having no relation to the final product

Marx was a materialist, but unlike previous materialists (cf. Hobbes, Locke), his philosophy doesn’t explain reality in terms of physics or biology, but economic forces. According to Marx, the structure of reality is composed of three parts:

  • The material foundation: natural resources, means of distribution and production, as well as the
  • relations between humans involved in production – The superstructure, which is composed of two:
  • – other social relations such as legal and political arrangements
    – higher culture which includes art, religion, morality, poetry and philosophy.

Marx saw that this division of reality automatically creates a class system: on the one hand a ruling class that owns the material resources and on the other the class that is dependent on them. Marx saw the entire history of society as the history of class struggle, and believed it reached its final stage in capitalism, where the struggle plays out between the ruling bourgeoisie and the working class proletariat that is being exploited.

According to Marx, the ideational features of society (the superstructure) denotes the dominant ideology (the larger religious, economic and political system). Ideology is a fundamental feature of society and is essentially a system of unconscious propaganda that maintains the foundational material structure and serves the interests of the ruling class. All politics, laws, art and other subjective features of society are moulded to maintain and perpetuate the prevailing ideology of its time. It is a complex all-encompassing system of values and beliefs that is accepted by society and is believed to be universal and eternal.

He spent most of his years describing the internal structure of capitalism and the internal contradictors in the system, collected in his the three-volume work Das Kapital (1867, 1885, 1894). He thought that the natural progression of the system would eventually result in the the internal collapse of capitalism and the revolt of the working class. This would lead to a socialist utopia, a world under the rule of the working class, an idea taken up and actualised by the revolutionaries of the Russian revolution.