Karl Marx
1818–1883, Trier and London
Historical materialism
Ideas don't drive history; the way we produce our lives does.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
The life
Marx was born in Trier, in the Rhineland, to a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism so his father could keep practising law. He studied law, then philosophy, and wrote a doctorate on Democritus and Epicurus.
Journalism ended his academic prospects. His paper was censored and shut down, and he moved to Paris, then Brussels, then, after the failed revolutions of 1848, to London, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
The London years were poor. Several of his children died, and he relied heavily on Engels' money and on writing newspaper columns. He spent his days in the British Museum reading room working through economics, political reports and factory inspectors' returns. Only the first volume of Capital appeared in his lifetime; Engels assembled the rest from notes.
What shaped the ideas
Industrial Britain gave Marx his material: a society producing wealth on a scale never seen, alongside conditions in the factory towns that were documented in appalling detail by government inspectors whose reports he quotes at length.
Philosophically he began from Hegel, who saw history as the unfolding of Spirit, and inverted it. The engine of history is not ideas working themselves out but human beings producing their means of life, with ideas following.
Core arguments
- 01
Historical materialism
The way a society produces determines its law, politics and ideas.
People must eat before they can philosophise. The forces and relations of production form the base, and legal, political and ideological structures arise on it. When the forces of production outgrow the existing relations, the relations eventually break, and that is what a revolution is.
- 02
Alienation
Wage labour separates workers from their work in four distinct ways.
The worker is separated from the product, which belongs to someone else; from the act of production, which is externally directed and not itself satisfying; from species-being, the capacity for free conscious creation that Marx takes to be distinctively human; and from other people, who become competitors. The complaint is not only that wages are low but that the activity itself has been hollowed out.
- 03
Surplus value
Profit comes from paying labour less than the value it produces.
The worker sells labour power for a wage covering its reproduction, and the working day extends beyond the point where that value has been produced. The remainder is surplus value, appropriated by the owner. On this analysis exploitation is structural rather than a matter of individual employers being unfair.
- 04
Ideology
The ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class.
Those who control material production also control the means of mental production, so the arrangements that suit them come to seem natural, eternal and simply how things are. Ideology is not usually deliberate lying; it is a systematic distortion in what appears obvious.
Commonly got wrong
- Marx wrote very little about how a communist society would actually operate, and mocked attempts to write recipes for the kitchens of the future. Most twentieth-century systems claiming him are elaborations by Lenin, Stalin and Mao.
- "Religion is the opium of the people" is half a sentence. The full passage calls religion the sigh of the oppressed creature and the heart of a heartless world, which is a diagnosis of suffering rather than a sneer.
- Historical materialism is not the claim that individuals are economically motivated. It is a claim about what shapes whole social structures, and Marx explicitly allowed that ideas can react back on the base.
Works
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1844, published 1932
The alienation material. Unpublished for nearly a century and it changed how he was read.
The German Ideology 1846, published 1932
With Engels. The clearest statement of historical materialism.
The Communist Manifesto 1848
A pamphlet written for a political moment. Vivid, and not where the analysis lives.
Capital, Volume I 1867
The commodity, value, surplus value, the working day. The only volume he finished.
The 1844 Manuscripts on alienated labour, about fifteen pages, then the Manifesto for the rhetoric.
Why they still get taught
He invented the study of society as a structure with a hidden economic logic. You do not have to be a Marxist to use his questions, and most of sociology, history and cultural criticism does.
Chapters
- Marx on Alienation · Power & Society