Marx

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

Karl Marx (1818–83) is the most famous of all socialist or communist figures. More has been said and done in the name of Marxism than in the name of the work of any other social thinker in history. By origin he was a German academic and journalist, heavily influenced by the German philosophy of idealism, and particularly by Hegel. His political beliefs curtailed his career in Germany, and Marx moved to Paris in 1843 and to London in 1849, thereafter working as a writer and revolutionary activist, in close association with Friedrich Engels, whose contribution to the Marxist canon is considerable. As befitted one of his theories, that there was a need for a close connection between political practice and political theorizing, Marx was always closely connected with communist and other revolutionary movements, and much of his more evocative writing consisted either of journalistic analyses of such movements, or historical accounts of would-be revolutions. Modern scholarship has suggested that there are at least two distinct phases in his writing: early Marx, which includes at least the rather humanistic ideas of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and The Communist Manifesto (1848); and later Marx, which has the much more technical and ‘scientific’ economics of Das Kapital, the first volume of which was published in 1867. (However, it should be noted that some scholars of Marx deny that his work was characterized by this epistemological break, and cite some works discovered relatively recently, notably the Grundrisse, from between these periods, as evidence for continuity.)

The most crucial part of his rich and complex theories is the doctrine that man, as a physical being, must be explained in materialistic terms. To Marx, a man was a being whose identity and nature arose out of his purely practical attempts to make his livelihood in what amounted almost to a struggle against a hostile physical environment.

As a result, what man did determined what he became. In practical terms this meant that the conditions under which he earned his living, as owner or proprietor, wage labourer or peasant, formed his ideology and consciousness. But as Marx also argued that man existed only as a member of an economic class, and that all classes were always in competition with others below or above them in an economically-supported power hierarchy, he saw human civilization as characterized by class warfare. That this warfare had an economically-determined course, leading to an ultimate communist society in which there would be no further class antagonisms, and therefore no inequality, was an absolute article of faith. From it derived all the later communist hopes for revolution from the proletariat and the socialist belief in the need to abolish private ownership of property, because, for Marxists, control of property is the very definition of a class system. Marx, in his voluminous writings, touched on endless aspects of social life, but all were ultimately linked to a simple formula: the essence of man is determined by labour in pursuit of material ends; control of material both creates upper and lower classes and gives the upper class control over politics, including the construction of ideologies and social consciousness. Beyond this there are implacable economic rules which ultimately determine economic development. These economic laws make it inevitable that, ultimately, capitalism will collapse because of its own inherent contradictions, and communism will emerge. It is sometimes mistakenly argued today that the collapse of self-styled Marxist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe has invalidated Marxism—the fact that no Marxist had accepted these self-descriptions for a generation before the collapse rendering the argument invalid.