Marx

Philosophy → Political Philosophy & Economics → Author (19th century)

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Overall stakes Karl Marx carries out a double inversion: he turns Hegel’s idealism on its head (it is not ideas that make history, but the material relations of production) and turns philosophy into a weapon for transforming the world. Famous quotation (11th Thesis on Feuerbach, 1845): “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt darauf an, sie zu verändern.” (“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”) The stakes are to think history as struggle, economics as the infrastructure (die Basis, f. / der Unterbau, m.) of the social, and emancipation as a practical task (die Praxis, f.) — a project at once scientific and revolutionary whose reach runs through the whole of the twentieth century.

Intellectual history (sources and ruptures)

The inherited Hegelian legacy, turned upside down Marx starts from Hegel (dialectic, history as process) but inverts idealism: the dialectic is “standing on its head”; it must be “set back on its feet” (Capital, Afterword to the second edition, 1873). Challenged by Feuerbach, from whom Marx nonetheless distances himself (The German Ideology, 1845–46): Feuerbach reduces religion to the human essence but forgets that this essence is historical and social, not an abstraction.

Historical materialism (der historische Materialismus, m.) History is driven by the contradictions between productive forces (die Produktivkräfte) and relations of production (die Produktionsverhältnisse). Key formula: “Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein” (“[social] being determines consciousness” — it is not consciousness that determines existence, but the reverse). The superstructure (der Überbau, m.) rests on the economic base (die Basis, f.). Challenged by Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905): religious ideas (Protestant asceticism) also caused economic transformations — infrastructure does not explain everything.

Main theses

1. History is the history of class struggle (Manifesto, 1848) Every society rests on the antagonism between those who own the means of production and those who own nothing but their labor power. Quotation (opening line of the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei): “Die Geschichte aller bisherigen Gesellschaft ist die Geschichte von Klassenkämpfen.” (“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” — die Klasse, f., class; der Klassenkampf, m., class struggle). The bourgeoisie (die Bourgeoisie / das Bürgertum, n.) versus the proletariat (das Proletariat, n.).

• Example: the industrial bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century versus the working-class proletariat; the conditions of English workers documented by Engels (The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845) and the British factory reports that Marx draws on in Capital.
• Counter-argument: for Tocqueville (Democracy in America, 1835–40), the driving force of modern history is not class struggle but the equalization of conditions; social mobility belies the fixity of classes.

2. Capitalism rests on the extraction of surplus value (Capital, 1867) Profit does not come from exchange but from unpaid labor: the worker produces more value than he receives in wages. Surplus value (der Mehrwert, m. — literally the “extra value”), drawn from labor power (die Arbeitskraft, f.); capital (das Kapital, n.); the commodity (die Ware, f.) and its “fetishism” (der Warenfetischismus, m.).

• Example: over a ten-hour working day in which the worker “repays” his wage in six hours, he works four hours for free for the capitalist — that is surplus value.
• Counter-argument: marginalist economics (Menger, Walras, Jevons, the 1870s) abandons the labor theory of value in favor of marginal utility — the value of a good depends on the subjective utility to the last consumer, not on the labor embodied in it.

3. Alienation: the worker dispossessed of himself (1844 Manuscripts) Under capitalism, the worker is estranged from the product of his labor, from his own activity, from his own nature, and from other people. Central concept: alienation (die Entfremdung, f. — the process of becoming a stranger, fremd, to oneself); man is deprived of his “generic being,” his species-essence (das Gattungswesen, n., species-being — humanity as a naturally creative and social being).

• Example: the assembly-line worker (later theorized by Taylorism from 1911 onward), who repeats a motion with no connection to the finished product or to any meaning.
• Counter-argument: Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958) shifts the analysis — the modern problem is not so much the alienation of labor as the reduction of all human activity to mere labor (animal laborans), at the expense of work and action.

Legacy and controversies Marxism inspired revolutions (1917, 1949) and a lasting social critique. Challenged by Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945), who classes Marxism among the non-falsifiable, and therefore unscientific, “historicisms” (Popper); and by the record of communist regimes, which critical Marxists themselves (the Frankfurt School) distinguish from Marx’s own thought.

Critical nuance One must distinguish Marx (the work, complex and unfinished — Capital remains partly posthumous) from “Marxism” (later doctrines and regimes). The “young Marx” (humanist, concerned with alienation) and the “mature Marx” (scientific, concerned with economic structures) are sometimes opposed — a reading proposed by Althusser (For Marx, 1965), who posits an “epistemological break” between the two.

Links

• Hegel
• Alienation
• Ideology
• Violence
• Philosophy