Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born into a Jewish family in the city of Trier in the southern Rhineland area. In 1830, the young Marx entered the Trier secondary school and pursued the traditional humanities curriculum. In August, 1844, Marx met Friedrich Engels in Paris, and the two began a productive collaboration. Marx's articles had angered the Prussian government, and in February, 1845, he moved to Brussels. Marx's lifelong critique of capitalist economy began in part as an analysis of the then-dominant Hegelian system of philosophical idealism. (Arnold, 97-105) Influenced to a degree by Ludwig Feuerbach's materialism, Marx rejected Hegel's metaphysical vision of a Weltgeist , or Absolute Spirit.

As Hegel (and others) suggested, the course of history was indeed a dialectical process of conflict and resolution, but for Marx this development was determined to a great extent by economic realities. Whereas Hegel saw dialectical process (thesis/antithesis/synthesis) as one of ideas, for Marx it was one of class struggle. Hence, Marx's position is called dialectical materialism. German philosophy, he believed, was mired in insubstantial theoretical speculation when concrete and practical thought about the relationship between reality—especially economic and political realities—and consciousness was needed. In general, Marx was a synthetic thinker, and his views represent a mixture of German materialist philosophy such as that of Feuerbach; the French social doctrines of Charles Fourier, Comte de Saint-Simon, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; and British theories of political economy such as those of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. (Berlin, 78-83)

Marx's philosophical position of a dialectical materialism suggests a comprehensive view of social organization—which is, broadly speaking, a dimension of human consciousness—in all its manifestations. All aspects of human social interaction, what Marx called the superstructure (Überbau), are influenced and shaped by the economic base and its consequent relationships of power among social classes. The superstructure ultimately involves a society's educational, legal, artistic, political, philosophical, and scientific systems. Various aspects of the artistic or cultural dimensions of a society (a novel, for example) might also incorporate in symbolic expression the nature of the economic base. Thus Marx's economic theories provide an account for a wide variety of phenomena.

Because the worker is reduced to an exploited commodity or object, the worker experiences a condition of dehumanization (Entmenschlichung). In The German Ideology , Marx discusses earlier forms of social organization, such as tribal or communal groups, in which the estrangement of the individual in industrialist society was not yet a crucial problem. This idealized notion of social organization in the writings of the young Marx indicates the utopian influence of Romantic thought upon his initial critique of capitalist society.

It presents a brief historical sketch of bourgeois society and suggests that capitalism will eventually collapse because of its inherent pattern of cyclical economic crises and because of the worsening situation of the worker class, or the proletariat, in all capitalist nations. The international communist party presents a revolutionary platform in which the workers are the ruling class in charge of all capital production. Marx and Engels call for a ...