Marxism

Marx fits within a wider group of Western thinkers who, beginning in the seventeenth century, offered new, secularized answers to the old questions, What is the good life for human beings? and, How is that life to be attained? In part, Marx was a laughing heir of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—a thinker far more optimistic about human prospects than almost all his predecessors. Yet there is also a basso profundo in his thinking, a sense of the immensity of pain and suffering that will be needed before humans can hope to become the free, autonomous, rational, loving, creative, communal beings that he hoped would eventually make their way on the earth.

Among major predecessors of Marx's social theory are Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and Adam Smith (1723–1790). Marx was also influenced by conceptions of the self associated with the German Romantic tradition. Many intellectual tendencies found their way into his thinking through the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), whose lectures (published shortly after his death) and books sought to cover the entire range of human culture. Further, although Marx's orientation was relentlessly secular, there are residues in his thinking of some religious conceptions. He continued, in a secular and universalized form, Christian conceptions of perfection. Further, as Warren Breckman has shown, his notion of humanity emerged from a theological debate concerning the personality of God.

Marx was born in Trier in the Rhineland region, which after the defeat of Napoléon in 1815 was ruled by conservative Prussia. Marx's father was obliged to convert from Judaism to Lutheranism in order to keep his position as a lawyer in the local court system. In 1835 Karl went to university—first to Bonn, the next year to Berlin. Although for career reasons his father wanted Marx to study law, Karl quickly gravitated to philosophy. He found the law too limiting, and he also believed for a time that, by pointing out inadequacies in existing institutions, philosophy could help bring about progressive change in Germany.

Hegel.

From 1837 onward Marx absorbed from Hegel's writings, as well as from the generalized Newtonianism then dominant, a particular understanding of what a properly rational, scientific knowledge of the world requires (Megill, chap. 1). Such an understanding, Marx held, must be universal in form and must generate necessary rather than merely probable knowledge. Further, Hegel regarded human history as a rational process of intellectual and cultural advance, analogous to the progress of knowledge that he saw in the history of philosophy, and Marx adopted this view also. Hegel held that philosophy advances by means of rational debate (called "dialectic" in Greek). Sharpening Hegel, Marx interpreted dialectic as requiring critique of the existing order.

After finishing his doctoral dissertation, on ancient philosophy, in 1841, Marx became an oppositional journalist. In October 1843 he moved to Paris, which was the center of European radicalism and the largest city on the European continent. Here he coedited a critical journal that was to be smuggled into Germany. He also intended to complete a critique of Hegel's political theory and to write a political history of revolutionary France. Meanwhile, in the streets, bars, cafés, and meeting rooms of Paris he discovered the revolutionary agent that he concluded would overthrow the existing order—the working class or, as he called it, the proletariat.

Estrangement (alienation).

By July 1844 Marx had abandoned political theory and political history (although he never abandoned political activism, to which he devoted intense time and energy). Instead he turned to a critique of economics. In his "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" (May/June–August 1844; published 1932) and in related manuscripts, Marx analyzed the claims of such economists as David Ricardo (1772–1823) and James Mill (1773–1836). Notably, he criticized them for ignoring the "estrangement" (or alienation) that he saw workers as subjected to in a private-property-based economic system. Workers do not find either gratification or the possibility of self-development in their work. The products of their labor become a means for oppressing them. They become estranged from each other.

Marx borrowed the notion of estrangement from the critical theologian Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). In his Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach had argued that religion estranges human beings from their best qualities, which are attributed to God, Christ, and so on. Religion therefore needs to be superseded by a this-worldly humanism. Marx's innovation was to apply Feuerbach's critique of religion to economic theory and economic life.

Marx also contended, although elliptically, that the system of private property and exchange (buying and selling) is irrational: it is unplanned, it results in an unpredictable rise and fall of prices, and it has no intelligible historical progression.

History of production and needs.

In January 1845 Marx moved to Brussels. In collaboration with the young businessman Engels, who had recently become his friend, he wrote The German Ideology (1845–1846; published 1932). Part 1, mostly Marx's work, sketches out a rational history of humankind, focused not on philosophy but on humans' actions to wrest a living from the material world. Using their intelligence, human beings develop their "productive forces," which improve over time. More advanced productive forces continually come into conflict with the retrograde forms by which society and production are organized (later, Marx and Engels would call these forms "relations of production"). History up to now, Marx and Engels held, has been dominated by class conflict: famously, they declared in their revolutionary pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (1848) that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." In their view, these struggles are all ultimately rooted in conflict between forces and relations of production.

Marx (and Engels) also asserted that history would culminate in a socialist society that would function without a political state and without private property and exchange. However, they offered only sketchy accounts as to how this society would actually operate.

The revolutions of 1848 and an analysis of capitalism.

The revolutions of 1848 disappointed Marx, for the established order proved remarkably successful in thwarting political—let alone social—reform. Marx responded to the disappointment by turning to a serious analysis of "the capitalist mode of production." Now living in London, he began in 1851 to study the economy systematically. After a massive effort of research, he published Capital (Das Kapital), volume 1, in 1867. Although never finished, Capital is rightly regarded as Marx's most important work. In it, he attempted to penetrate beneath the arbitrary, merely surface phenomena of economic life to what he saw as capitalism's deep structure.

Adding to his earlier claims about estrangement, Marx in Capital focused to a greater degree than earlier on what he saw as the irrational and exploitative aspects of capitalism. Under capitalism, he held, workers are necessarily exploited—that is, they are deprived of the "surplus value" that their labor creates. Exploitation, he contended, is unavoidable as long as the capitalist system (oriented to private property and the market) exists.

Most subsequent economists rejected Marx's claim that labor is the sole creator of value, as well as his related assumption that the value of a commodity somehow exists objectively in the commodity. However, two of Marx's general contentions have not yet been proved false. First, he was persuaded that capitalism has a built-in dynamism, a tendency to transform its own conditions of production. Indeed, in The Communist Manifesto he and Engels were perhaps the first to sketch out the process of worldwide capitalist expansion and transformation that we now call "globalization." Second, he held that exploitation under capitalism does not arise from the good or bad intentions of individuals, but is systemic. Position in the system, not greater intelligence or harder work, is the most likely explanation for why the coffee futures trader in New York makes vastly more money than the small coffee producer in Central America.

Necessity of revolution.

The convinced, root-and-branch Marxist claims that capitalism must be destroyed because it necessarily brings with it estrangement, exploitation, and a disorderly irrationality (overproduction, underconsumption, boom-and-bust economic cycles). The root-and-branch Marxist holds that piecemeal reform of the system is insufficient to solve these problems. He or she also holds that capitalism will be destroyed—it is doomed to collapse.

Insistence that capitalism cannot be reformed and that the proletariat (the industrial working class) is the revolutionary class that will destroy it were the two touchstones of Marx's thinking from 1843–1844 onward. To be sure, in his later years Marx suggested that in some countries revolution might occur by electoral rather than by solely violent means, and Engels shared this view. But this was not a rejection of revolution, which in Marx's lexicon equates not to violence, but to a radical transformation of the dominant economic and social system however achieved.

A conceptual treasure-trove.

Marx wrote interestingly on more topics than the ones noted above. His letters, published works, and manuscripts contain many false starts, curiosity-driven meanderings, pregnant suggestions, intelligent analyses, incipient but never fully developed theories, and journalistic commentaries on current events, as well as reservations concerning some of his own views. He was often insistently dogmatic, and yet at other times surprisingly flexible. Toward the end of his life, he rebelled against a dogmatic tendency that he detected among some of his followers, declaring "I am not a Marxist."