Karl Marx
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| Full name | Karl Heinrich Marx. |
|---|---|
| Born | May 5, 1818 Trier, Prussia |
| Died | March 14, 1883 (aged 64) London, United Kingdom |
| Era | 19th century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Hegelianism |
| Main interests | Politics, economics, philosophy, sociology, history, class struggle |
| Notable ideas | Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels), surplus value, contributions to the Labour theory of value, alienation and exploitation of the worker, The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, materialist conception of history |
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Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socio-economic change. He argued that the structural contradictions within capitalism necessitate its end, giving way to socialism. "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."[6]We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged ... the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes ... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring order into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.[6]
On the other hand, Marx argued that socio-economic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. He argued that 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."[7]
While Marx remained a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas and the ideology of Marxism began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence gained added impetus with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution in 1917, and few parts of the world remained significantly untouched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. Marx is typically cited, with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.[8]
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[edit] Biography
Marx had seven children by his wife: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–83); Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1845–1911); Edgar (1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy ("Guido"; 1849–1850); Jenny Eveline Frances ("Franziska"; 1851–52); Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–98) and one more who died before being named (July 1857). There are allegations that Marx also fathered a son out of wedlock by his housekeeper, Helene Demuth.[13]
Several of Marx's closest friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich Engels. Engels's 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.[16] | ” |
Marx's tombstone bears the carved messages: "WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE", the final line of The Communist Manifesto, and Engels's version of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach:[17]
| “ | The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways—the point however is to change it[18] | ” |
Cultural historians may regard Karl Marx as the first major social theorist to form a series of concepts within the break between modern and premodern societies.[22]
[edit] Career
"If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people."
— Karl Marx, in a letter to his father, 1835[23]
[edit] Education
Marx was privately educated until 1830, when he enrolled at Trier High School, until his expulsion.[10] He enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of seventeen; he wished to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field of study.[24] At Bonn he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft der Treveraner) and at one point served as its president. Because of Marx's poor grades, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented University of Berlin, where his legal studies became less significant than excursions into philosophy and history.[25]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.[25]
[edit] Marx and the Young Hegelians
The Left or Young Hegelians consisted of a group of radical thinkers[25] circling around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, and opposing their teacher Hegel. Despite their criticism of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, they made use of Hegel's dialectical method as a powerful weapon for the critique of established politics and religion. 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. Stirner's work made a deep impression on Marx, at that time a follower of Feuerbach: he 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.[26] 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. During his years at college, the official lectures on Hegel left Marx feeling ill, "from intense vexation at having to make an idol of a view I detested."[24][edit] Marx in Paris and Brussels
Owing to the conditions of censorship in Prussia, Marx retired from the editorial board of the Rheinische Zeitung, and planned to publish, with Arnold Ruge, another revolutionary from Germany, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,[27] (the German-French Annals) based in Paris, and arrived in late October 1843. Paris at this time served as the home and headquarters of German, British, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries. In Paris, on August 28, 1844, at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais he met Friedrich Engels, who would become his most important friend and life-long companion. Engels had met Marx only once before (and briefly) at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842;[28] he went to Paris to show Marx his recently published book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.[29] This book convinced Marx that the working class would be the agent and instrument of the final revolution in history.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, Vorwärts, established and run by the secret society called League of the Just. When not writing, Marx studied the history of the French Revolution and read Proudhon.[30] 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)[31] to his first hand contacts with socialist intellectuals [and books] in France.[32] | ” |
In January 1845, after Vorwärts expressed its hearty approval of an assassination attempt on Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, the French authorities ordered Marx, among many others, to leave Paris. He and Engels moved on to Brussels in Belgium.
Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history, and in collaboration with Engels elaborated on his idea of historical materialism, particularly in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), which stated as its basic thesis 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 under the influence of Marx and Engels. Later that year, Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions, and often violent upheavals, the Revolutions of 1848. The Belgian authorities arrested and expelled Marx from Belgium.[33]
In February 1848 a radical movement 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 went 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.
[edit] London
Given the repeated failures and frustrations of workers' revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to understand capitalism, and spent a great deal of time in the reading room of the British Museum studying and reflecting on the works of political economists and on economic data. By 1857 he had accumulated over 800 pages of notes and short essays on capital, landed, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market; this work did not appear in print until 1941, under the title Grundrisse. In 1859, Marx published Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work. 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 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.
During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he became 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. His Critique of the Gotha Programme 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 a letter to Vera Zasulich dated March 8, 1881, Marx even 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.[35] While admitting that Russia's rural "commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia", Marx also warned that in order for the mir to operate as a means for moving straight to the socialist stage without a preceding capitalist stage, it "would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it (the rural commune) from all sides".[36] Given the elimination of these pernicious influences, Marx allowed, that "normal conditions of spontaneous development" of the rural commune could exist.[37] However, in the same letter to Vera Zaulich, Marx points out that "at the core of the capitalist system ... lies the complete separation of the producer from the means of production".[38] Marx can be forgiven for not seeing at this early stage in 1881, the conditions inside the rural commune that would soon lead to the "differentiation of the peasantry" within the Russian rural commune and the gradual separation of many peasants within the commune from the means of production.
Writing with the advantage of nearly twenty additional years of closer observation of the rural communes in Russia, V. I. Lenin was able to conclude that the rural commune could not be the agent socialist development in Russia, exactly because increasing numbers of Russian peasants within the rural communes were being separated from the means of production within the rural commune.[39] Within the Russian rural commune, land was the "means of production". Ideally, all peasants in the rural commune would own or have access to an equal share of the land operated by the commune. Lenin's close analysis of the communes concludes that not all peasants within the rural commune had equal access to land. Indeed, at the time that Lenin wrote his book (1899), there was already a drastic difference between the amount of land cultivated by some rich kulak peasants as opposed to other poorer peasants within the rural commune.[40] Furthermore, this condition was not static. Rather the "differentiation of the peasantry" within the rural commune was an ongoing process. More and more small peasants within the rural commune were becoming unable to support themselves on the small amount of land they had access to within the rural commune.
Inevitably, many poor peasants within the rural communes across Russia were actually "landless". As the years went by many more of the small peasants within the rural communes were becoming landless as the process of "differentiation of the peasantry" allowed the rich peasants to become richer and the poor peasants became poorer.
Some of the landless peasants were required to seek employment from the richer "kulak" peasants within the rural commune. These landless peasants would be considered a part of the rural proletariat. Other landless peasants would leave the commune altogether and join the urban proletariat. Whichever way the landless peasant went, Lenin points out that this development is totally familiar to us as nothing more or less than the familiar process of the ruin and "proletariatization" of the small peasantry, by the complete separation of that small "landless" peasantry from the means of production.[41]
[edit] Marx's thought
Main article: Marxism
[edit] Influences on Marx's thought
Main article: Influences on Karl Marx
Marx's thought demonstrates strong influences from:- Hegel's dialectical method and historical orientation;
- the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;
- French socialist and sociological thought, in particular the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier;
- earlier German philosophical materialism, particularly that of Ludwig Feuerbach
- the solidarity with the working class of Friedrich Engels
Marx's critiques of German philosophical idealism, British political economy, and French socialism depended heavily on the influence of Feuerbach and Engels. Hegel had thought in idealist terms, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that one needed 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 came from 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. Engels' article "Outlines of Political Economy" in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher also had a great influence in directing him towards the study of the workings of the capitalist economy.
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 would inevitably occur. 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 espouse not fatalism, but activism: they believe that revolutionaries must organize social change.
[edit] Philosophy
Main article: Marxist philosophy
See also: Marx's theory of human nature and Marx's theory of alienation
Further information: The Poverty of Philosophy, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and Theses on Feuerbach
Fundamentally, Marx assumed that human nature involves transforming material nature. To this process of transformation he applies the term "labour", and to the capacity to transform nature the term "labour power". Marx stated:| “ | 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's analysis of history focuses on the organisation of labor and depends on his distinction between:
- the means / forces of production, literally those things (like land, natural resources, and technology) necessary for the production of material goods; and
- the relations of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production.
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—that is, whether or not a group owns the means of production. For Marx:
| “ | The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. | ” |
| — (The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1) |
Commodity fetishism provides an example of what Engels called "false consciousness", which relates closely to the understanding of ideology. By "ideology", Marx and Engels meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which contemporaries see 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[49] 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) |
[edit] Political economy
Main article: Das Kapital
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, a difference often exists between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practise 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 the capitalist can produce. 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.
Capitalism can stimulate considerable growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies and capital equipment. Marx considered the capitalist class to be one of the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly improved 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 thought that during such an economic crisis the price of labour would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy.
Marx believed that increasingly severe crises would punctuate this cycle of growth, collapse, and more growth. Moreover, he believed that in the long-term this process would necessarily enrich and empower the capitalist class and impoverish the proletariat. He believed that if the proletariat were 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. He theorized that between capitalism and the establishment of a socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat—a period where the working class holds political power and forcibly socializes the means of production—would exist. 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."[50] While he allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic institutional structures (such as 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."[51]
[edit] As a founder of social science
Marx is typically cited, along with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.[8] Both Marx and Auguste Comte set out to develop scientifically justified ideologies in the wake of European secularisation and new developments in the philosophies of history and science. Whilst Marx, working in the Hegelian tradition, rejected Comtean sociological positivism, in attempting to develop a science of society he nevertheless came to be recognized as a founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning. For Isaiah Berlin, Marx may be regarded as the "true father" of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone can claim the title."[52]To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which most occupied men's minds at the time, and to have deduced from them clear practical directives without creating obviously artificial links between the two, was the principle achievement of Marx's theory ... The sociological treatment of historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense.
– Isaiah Berlin Karl Marx: His Life and Environment 1937, [53]
[edit] Marx's influence
See also: Marxism
| “ | The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it, he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. | ” |
| — Che Guevara, Marxist revolutionary[54] |
Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" in one of two ways:
- to describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (for example: "mode of production", "class", "commodity fetishism") to understand capitalist and other societies; or:
- to describe those who regard a workers' revolution as the only means to a communist society.
Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization proved far more successful than the First International: it included mass workers' parties, particularly the large and successful Social Democratic Party of Germany, which predominantly expressed a Marxist outlook. The Second 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 the later stages of which a left-wing splinter-group of the Second International, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took power. The Russian Revolution dynamized workers around the world into setting up their own section of the Bolsheviks' "Third International". Lenin presented himself as both the philosophical and the political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called "Leninism" or "Bolshevism", which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized vanguard "Communist Party".
Marx believed that 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 then ignite revolution in the advanced industrial societies of Europe, where society is ready for socialism, and which could then in turn come to the aid of the workers' state in Russia.[56]
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) |
Under Lenin, and particularly under Joseph Stalin, Bolshevik oppression came to characterise Marxism abroad. Capitalism-oriented western states encouraged this impression, as did 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 the Stalinist conception of Marxism.
The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and the Bolshevists in several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendancy 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. Though the Frankfurt School became highly influential, both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice have criticized their work 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 Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, both often grouped along with the Frankfurt School under the term "Western Marxism". Marx was also an important influence on the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, an occasional associate of Adorno and the Frankfurt School.
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 American 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 became another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy, as did the Israeli Shlomo Avineri.
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".
The following countries at some point had governments with leadership which at least nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still did as of 2009): Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Nepal, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Soviet Union, 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 in influence since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably Nepal.
In July 2005, 27.9% of listeners in a BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time poll selected Marx as their favorite thinker.[59]
[edit] Accusations of antisemitism
Some authors like Bernard Lewis, Edward H. Flannery and Hyam Maccoby, view Marx's On The Jewish Question as an antisemitic work, and identify what they contend are antisemitic epithets in his published and private writings.[60][61] According to them, Marx regarded Jews as the embodiment of capitalism and thus the creators of its evils.[62]The above authors often quote the following excerpt from On The Jewish Question to support their arguments:
| “ | What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money. Well then, an emancipation from haggling and money, from practical, real Judaism would be the self emancipation of our age... ...The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.[63] | ” |
[edit] Works (selection)
- The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law (1842)
- Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843
- On the Jewish Question, 1843
- Notes on James Mill, 1844
- Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 1844
- The Holy Family, 1845
- Theses on Feuerbach, 1845
- The German Ideology, 1845
- The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
- Wage-Labor and Capital, 1847
- Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852
- Grundrisse, 1857
- A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859
- Writings on the U.S. Civil War, 1861
- Theories of Surplus Value, 3 volumes, 1862
- Value, Price and Profit, 1865
- Capital, Volume I (Das Kapital), 1867
- The Civil War in France, 1871
- Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875
- Notes on Wagner, 1883
- Capital, Volume II [posthumously published by Engels], 1885
- Capital, Volume III [posthumously published by Engels], 1894
