BIOGRAPHY

It is hard to think of a more influential--or more controversial--nineteenth-century thinker than Karl Marx. Not content simply to develop a theory, Marx sought fundamental change in social, economic, and political structures. As he put it, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it."

Marx was the third of nine children born to Heinrich and Henrietta Marx in the Rhineland town of Trier. His parents were of Jewish ancestry but had converted to Protestant Christianity to protect Heinrich's job as a government lawyer. In 1835, Karl went to the University of Bonn to study law. Hardly the model student, he spent much of his time drinking or writing love letters to his childhood sweetheart and then fiancée, Jenny von Westphalen. At his father's insistence, Marx transferred to the University of Berlin and began to focus on his studies. While there, he abandoned his legal training and began preparing for an academic career as a philosophy professor. He wrote a dissertation contrasting Democritus and Epicurus that was accepted by the University of Jena, and in 1841 Marx received his doctorate in philosophy.

But the leftist politics Marx had adopted while in Berlin made it impossible for him to obtain a university post, so in 1842 he took a position as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette), a liberal middle-class newspaper in Cologne. Marx was successful as an editor--too successful for the government censors who suppressed the paper after an article by Marx on the poverty of the Mosel winemakers. Marx moved to Paris where he became coeditor of the new journal, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals). With his future seeming secure, Marx finally felt free to marry Jenny in 1843. But the Jahrbücher closed almost immediately and once again he was unemployed. Fortunately, at about the same time, Marx received a sizable settlement from the shareholders of the Rheinishe Zeitung, and he and his new bride were able to live comfortably. Freed from his editing duties, Marx wrote extensively on economic and political matters. He also met the man who was to be his lifelong friend, collaborator, and financial backer: Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Engels came from a family of wealthy textile industrialists and was, himself, the manager of his family's Manchester, England, branch. Together Marx and Engels produced The Holy Family (1845), Marx's first published book, which criticized a number of their fellow leftists.

While pursuing his writing projects, Marx was politically active among German communists living in Paris--activity that led to his expulsion from France in 1845. Living for a time in Brussels, Marx produced The German Ideology (1846) and The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) while continuing his political involvement. In 1847, he attended the congress of the newly formed Communist League in London. He and Engels were commissioned to produce an easy-to-read pamphlet outlining the league's doctrines. The result was the immensely influential Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848).

Following another attempt at editing an opposition newspaper in Cologne--and another expulsion by the government--Marx eventually settled in London. The next two decades were a time of poverty and hardship for the Marx family due as much to financial mismanagement as to lack of income. (Marx reflected often on the irony of his extensive work on capital when he had so little talent for managing it personally.) Marx received some income as a correspondent for the New York Tribune; but for the rest of his life, his primary source of income was Engels's gifts. In London, Marx became a fixture in the reading room of the British Museum, where he pored over government records, histories, and the writings of other economists, gathering data to document his thought. There he wrote Critique of Political Economy (1859) and began his magnum opus, Das Kapital (Capital; 1867). He also continued his political involvement, becoming the leader of the International Working Men's Association. He worked with the International until factional strife, particularly conflict with the anarchist Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876), led Marx to dismantle the organization in 1872.

An anti-socialist cartoon from 19th Century France.

It wasn't until Marx's final years that he managed to gain some financial stability and to live the life of a bourgeois Victorian gentleman. But these years also brought tragedy and hardship of a different kind. Marx developed boils over his entire body and used creosote, opium, and arsenic among other remedies in a futile attempt to effect a cure. His beloved Jenny died in 1881 and his eldest daughter two years later. Shortly thereafter, Marx himself developed bronchitis and also died in 1883.

BASIC THOUGHT

While a student in Berlin, Marx had come under the influence of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel had understood history as a progressive actualization of the Absolute, but he was somewhat ambiguous about the future. One group of followers, the Old Hegelians, argued in a reactionary way that this progressive actualization was now complete and that Christianity was the Absolute Religion, Hegelianism the Absolute Philosophy, and Prussia the Absolute State. Another group, the Young Hegelians, led by Bruno Bauer, argued that the dialectical movement of history was continuing. To move to the next stage in this historical dialectic, they sought to expose the contradictions of the existing order.

Although Marx accepted Hegel's dialectical understanding of history, he became convinced that Hegel's philosophy (and that of the Young Hegelians) devalued humanity by its emphasis on the Absolute. Marx then drew on the materialism espoused in Ludwig Feuerbach's work, The Essence of Christianity (1841). Feuerbach had argued that Hegel's philosophy was nothing more than rationalized religion, asserting that humans were merely the "self-alienation," or loss of identity, of God. Instead, Feuerbach advocated an atheistic materialism that claimed that "God" was simply the self-alienation of humans. That is, all the divine characteristics were nothing more than idealized human characteristics objectified and projected onto an imagined deity.

In "The Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy," from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx uses Feuerbach's work to present his criticism of Hegel. Marx expresses appreciation for Hegel's dialectical understanding of the "self-creation of man as a process" and points out that Hegel conceives of "objective man" as the result of "his own labor." But Hegel understood labor as being "abstract mental" labor, not the natural, embodied interaction with real objects that concerned Marx. On the other hand, although he appreciated Feuerbach's materialism, Marx held that his predecessor did not tie his criticism to historical development. "As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist," wrote Marx. Synthesizing the historical development of Hegel and the materialism of Feuerbach, Marx's theory has often been called "dialectical materialism" (though Marx himself did not use that term).

Paupers in a 19th Century workhouse walking on a wheel. According to Marx, this is only an extreme example of the alienation all workers face.

In The German Ideology, Marx explains the difference between the Young and the Old Hegelians. He goes on to give a brief history of the modes of production and the types of ownership associated with each. He concludes by arguing that it is these modes of production, "the material activity and the material intercourse of men," that determines politics, law, religion, and philosophy.

Throughout his analysis of the human situation, Marx continually returned to these material forces of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. In the short Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, reprinted here, Marx explains how the real foundations of society are the productive forces and the relations of production. His brief overview of these forces serves as a helpful introduction to his method and program.