Karl Marx

Key ideas

1. Historical materialism. How a society produces its material life shapes its legal, political and intellectual forms. In the 1859 Preface Marx wrote: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”
2. Alienation. In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx argued that under wage labour workers are separated from the product of their work, from their productive activity, from other people and from their own human nature, though work could be creative and fulfilling.
3. Class struggle. The Communist Manifesto opens: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” In capitalism the conflict is between the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who sell their labour for wages.
4. Ideology. Marx treated ideology as widely held falsehoods that serve the interests of a dominant class and help to stabilise a class-divided society, which explains why the exploited so often accept their condition.
5. Exploitation and surplus value. The capitalist buys a worker’s labour power for a wage. The value of the goods the worker makes in a day exceeds that wage, and the difference, surplus value, is the source of profit. Marx called this exploitation.
6. Commodity fetishism. In a market society the products of human labour, commodities, seem to take on a life of their own and come to dominate the people who made them. Marx saw this as a further form of alienation.
7. Communism and human emancipation. Marx distinguished political emancipation, equal rights within the state, from human emancipation, a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German philosopher, social theorist and revolutionary socialist. With Friedrich Engels he developed historical materialism, the theory that how a society produces its material life shapes its laws, politics and ideas, and he analysed capitalism as a system of exploitation, alienation and recurring crisis. His ideas, and those later built on them, are called Marxism.

Who was Karl Marx?

Marx was born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, and took a doctorate in philosophy at Jena in 1841 with a thesis comparing Democritus and Epicurus. He then wrote for the radical Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne until Prussia banned it in 1843. In Paris he wrote the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and began his collaboration with Engels. In Brussels he wrote the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) and, with Engels, The German Ideology, and in 1848 the Communist Manifesto for the Communist League.

Ordered out of Prussia in 1849 and then expelled from Paris, he settled in London that August and lived there for the rest of his life, becoming a leading figure in the First International. The first volume of Capital appeared in 1867; Engels edited the second (1885) and third (1894) from Marx’s manuscripts. Marx died in London on 14 March 1883, a stateless man, and was buried at Highgate.

What is historical materialism?

The classic summary is the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. People enter into relations of production that correspond to a stage in the development of their material powers of production, and these form “the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures”. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” When the productive forces outgrow the existing relations, “Then comes the period of social revolution.”

Interpreters disagree about how strictly deterministic this is. The Stanford Encyclopedia separates a development thesis, that productive forces tend to grow over time, from a primacy thesis, that their level explains a society’s economic structure. The phrase “dialectical materialism”, which the UGC NET syllabus lists, is not Marx’s: Joseph Dietzgen used it in 1887 and Georgi Plekhanov brought it into Marxist writing in the 1890s. See historical materialism, materialism and dialectic.

What is alienation?

In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx held that work can be creative and fulfilling, and that under wage labour it becomes something external to the worker. The alienation has four sides: from the product, from the activity of producing, from other people, and from one’s own human nature. The critique rests on a rich view of human flourishing, which includes recreation, culture and artistic expression as well as subsistence.

How does Marx analyse capitalism?

The Manifesto begins: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Engels added in 1888 that this means “all written history”, since the prehistory of society was then all but unknown. Under capitalism the class struggle is between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Capital explains how profit arises. Workers sell their labour power; the work they do beyond what covers their wage is surplus labour, and its product is the capitalist’s profit. Marx also argued that as industry mechanises the rate of profit tends to fall, and that the commodities people produce seem to acquire a life of their own, which he called commodity fetishism. Ideology, in his sense, is the set of beliefs that helps a class-divided society stay stable.

What did Marx want?

The Manifesto imagines “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) he gave the formula “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that “dictatorship” in the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” has the older sense of emergency rule, not modern totalitarianism. Whether Marx thought capitalism unjust is an open interpretive question, because he does not say so directly.

Marx, empire and India

Writing in the New-York Daily Tribune in 1853, Marx said England had “a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating”. The Stanford Encyclopedia observes that his ambivalence about colonialism matches his ambivalence about capitalism in Europe, and that his view of colonialism as progressive can read as a rationalisation of foreign rule. In India Marx’s ideas shaped movements and thinkers such as M. N. Roy, who helped found communist parties in Mexico and India and later turned to radical humanism, and B. R. Ambedkar, whose unfinished essay Buddha or Karl Marx weighed the two.

Criticism and influence

Many economists reject the labour theory of value, and critics doubt that capitalism’s crises must end in a proletarian revolution. Governments calling themselves Marxist ruled many countries in the twentieth century; how far they followed Marx is contested, and he died in 1883. Karl Löwith thought Marx and Kierkegaard the two greatest successors of Hegel, and Marx is often counted among the founders of modern sociology.

How should you start reading Marx?

Begin with the Manifesto, then the eleven Theses on Feuerbach and the 1859 Preface. In The Eighteenth Brumaire he writes: “Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth.” For the economics read the first chapter of Capital. Both exams list Marxism: see the UGC NET guide and the UPSC guide.