Karl Marx 1818-1883

Marx was born in Germany to Jewish parents but later converted to Lutherism . His career took many different turns as he moved from studying law, to philosophy then to revolution.  Marx met Fredrich Engles in 1844 in Paris. Engles was a factory owner so he was living right in the heart of the industrial revolution. Engles had a profound influence in Marx’s most renowned publication “The Communist Manifesto”.

Marx believed that you could explain everything about a society by analysing the way economic forces shape social, religious, legal and political processes. He described man as the productive animal; mankind creates the environment it inhabits, “not a figure in the landscape, but the shaper of the landscape”.  Like Hegel, Marx had a teleological approach to history, he believed it was heading towards something.

According to Engles Marx’s theory provided a fusion of:
1) Hegelian Philosophy
2) British Empiricism
3)French Revolutionary Politics – Especially socialist politics

Although Marx did not agree with Hegel’s mysticism, he did however like Hegel’s dialectic, the system of change through conflict. Marx saw the significance in the class struggle throughout history and sought the explanation of the historical process through the relationship between man and the material conditions of his existence (dialectic materialism).

Marx was opposed to capitalism because it produced “alienation”.  The property-less working class (proletariat) had nothing to lose but everything to gain, yet they still did nothing to change their situation. Marx stated this was due to the fact that capitalism alienates men from themselves and from each other; we begin to see one another as commodities to exploit. Work is the loss of self, it belongs to another, it does not help to develop our body or mind.  (This is characterised in instances where people state they are not themselves when they are at work.)  Capitalism alienates us from our need for satisfying work, replacing it with the desire for money.  Capitalism seeds its own destruction, the things we want to buy will always be more expensive than what we could earn, the system in itself doesn’t work. Although capitalism will try to survive, Marx states that the fixes are only temporary and the collapse of capitalism is inevitable.

In a communist society there would be no difference between mental and physical labour. Whether you’re a scientist, a musician or a bin man, has no relevance as all of these jobs would have equal worth. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.  People will do the job which they enjoy and which they are skilled at. There would be no need for a state as everyone would have an equal share of money. Marx saw communism as being a utopian society, a Garden of Eden on Earth.