Karl Heinrich Marx
"Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains."
― Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 - March 14 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867–1894).
Marx's theories about society, economics and politics – the collective understanding of which is known as Marxism – hold that human societies progress through class struggle: a conflict between an ownership class that controls production and a dispossessed labouring class that provides the labour for production. States, Marx believed, were run on behalf of the ruling class and in their interest while representing it as the common interest of all; and he predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: Socialism.
Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history. Governments self-professedly supporting Marxism took power in a variety of countries in the 20th century, leading to the formation of such states as the Soviet Union in 1922 and the People's Republic of China in 1949. Many labour unions and political parties worldwide are influenced by Marxism, some supporting ideological variants.
Early Life
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx and Henrietta Pressburg (1788-1863). He was born at 664 Brückergasse in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. Ancestrally Jewish, his maternal grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Meier Halevi Marx. Karl's father, as a child known as Herschel, was the first in the line to receive a secular education; he became a lawyer and lived a relatively wealthy and middle-class existence, with his family owning a number of Moselle vineyards. Prior to his son's birth, and to escape the constraints of anti-semitic legislation, Herschel converted from Judaism to the Protestant Christian denomination of Lutheranism, the predominant sect in Germany and Prussia at the time, taking on the German forename of Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel.
Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. A classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, then governed by an absolute monarchy. In 1815 Heinrich Marx began work as an attorney, in 1819 moving his family to a ten-room property near the Porta Nigra. His wife, a Dutch Jewish woman, Henrietta Pressburg, was semi-literate and was said to suffer from "excessive mother love", devoting much time to her family and insisting on cleanliness within her home.
Little is known of Karl Marx's childhood. The third of nine children, he became the oldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819. Young Karl was baptised into the Lutheran Church in August 1824. His surviving siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie and Karoline, were also baptised as Lutherans. Young Karl was privately educated, by Heinrich Marx, until 1830, when he entered Trier High School, whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of his father.
In October 1835 at the age of 17, Marx travelled to the University of Bonn wishing to study philosophy and literature: however, his father insisted on law as a more practical field. Due to a condition referred to as a "weak chest", Karl was excused from military duty when he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political radicals that was being monitored by the police. Marx also joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft der Treveraner), at one point serving as club co-president.
Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. A classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, then governed by an absolute monarchy. In 1815 Heinrich Marx began work as an attorney, in 1819 moving his family to a ten-room property near the Porta Nigra. His wife, a Dutch Jewish woman, Henrietta Pressburg, was semi-literate and was said to suffer from "excessive mother love", devoting much time to her family and insisting on cleanliness within her home.
Little is known of Karl Marx's childhood. The third of nine children, he became the oldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819. Young Karl was baptised into the Lutheran Church in August 1824. His surviving siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie and Karoline, were also baptised as Lutherans. Young Karl was privately educated, by Heinrich Marx, until 1830, when he entered Trier High School, whose headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, was a friend of his father.
In October 1835 at the age of 17, Marx travelled to the University of Bonn wishing to study philosophy and literature: however, his father insisted on law as a more practical field. Due to a condition referred to as a "weak chest", Karl was excused from military duty when he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political radicals that was being monitored by the police. Marx also joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft der Treveraner), at one point serving as club co-president.
Communist Manifesto
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution."
― Karl Marx
- The Communist Manifesto (Das Kommunistische Manifest), originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is an 1848 publication written by economic and political theorists and social scientists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
- It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League's purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.
- The book contains Marx and Engels' theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism.
Contents
Introduction
The preamble to the main text of the Manifesto states that the continent of Europe fears the "spectre of communism", and the powers of old Europe are uniting in "a holy alliance [intended to] exorcise this spectre". Marx refers here to not only the houses of power and landed gentry of old Europe—the bourgeoisie—but diverse factions such as the papacy and the emerging corporate world as well.Marx declares that "It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself".
I. Bourgeois and Proletarians
The first chapter of the Manifesto, "Bourgeois and Proletarians", examines the Marxist conception of history, with the initial idea asserting that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It goes on to say that in capitalism, the working class, proletariat, are fighting in the class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the bourgeois, and that past class struggle ended either with revolution that restructured society, or "common ruin of the contending classes". It continues by adding that the bourgeois exploits the proletariat through the "constant revolutionizing of production [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions". The Manifesto explains that the reason the bourgeois exist and exploit the proletariat with low wages is private property, "The accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital", and that wage labor is created entirely by competition among the workers.
II. Proletarians and Communists
The second section, "Proletarians and Communists", starts by stating the relationship of conscious communists to the rest of the working class, declaring that they will not form a separate party that opposes other working-class parties, will express the interests and general will of the proletariat as a whole, and will distinguish themselves from other working-class parties by always expressing the common interest of the entire proletariat independently of all nationalities and representing the interests of the movement as a whole.
The section goes on to defend communism from various objections, such as the claim that communists advocate "free love", and the claim that people will not perform labour in a communist society because they have no incentive to work. The section ends by outlining a set of short-term demands:
- Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
- A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
- Abolition of all right of inheritance.
- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
- Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
- Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
- Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
- Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
- Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
- Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form and combination of education with industrial production.
III. Socialist and Communist Literature
The third section, "Socialist and Communist Literature," distinguishes communism from other socialist doctrines prevalent at the time the Manifesto was written. While the degree of reproach of Marx and Engels toward rival perspectives varies, all are dismissed for advocating reformism and failing to recognise the preeminent role of the working class.
IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties
The concluding section, "Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties", briefly discusses the communist position on struggles in specific countries in the mid-nineteenth century such as France, Switzerland, Poland, and Germany, and declares that Germany "is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution", and predicts that a world revolution will soon follow. It then ends by declaring an alliance with the social democrats, boldly supporting other communist revolutions, and calling the proletarians to action, ending with the rallying cry of communism, "Workers of the world, unite!".
Das Kapital
"Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
― Karl Marx
- Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Capital: Critique of Political Economy), by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of political economy, intended to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production.
- One of the major works of the 19th-century economist and philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83), in which he expounded his theory of the capitalist system, its dynamism, and its tendencies toward self-destruction. He described his purpose as to lay bare “The economic law of motion of modern society.” The second and third volumes were published posthumously, edited by his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95).
- Karl Marx proposes that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labour, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value and then profit both of which concepts have a specific meaning for Marx. The employer is able to claim the right to profits because he or she owns the productive capital assets (means of production), which are legally protected by the capitalist state through property rights (the historical section shows how this right was acquired in the first place chiefly through plunder and conquest and the activity of the merchant and 'middle-man').
- Das Kapital spells out Marx’s concept of the “surplus value” of labour and its consequences for capitalism. According to Marx, it was not the pressure of population that drove wages to the subsistence level but rather the existence of a large army of unemployed, which he blamed on the capitalists. He maintained that within the capitalist system, labour was a mere commodity that could gain only subsistence wages.
The critique of the political economy of capitalism
- The commodity is the basic "cell-form" (trade unit) of a capitalist society, but capitalism is distinguished from other forms of production based on commodities in that here labour power becomes a commodity like any other. Moreover, because commerce, as a human activity, implied no morality beyond that required to buy and sell goods and services, the growth of the market system made discrete entities of the economic, the moral, and the legal spheres of human activity in society; hence, subjective moral value is separate from objective economic value. Subsequently, political economy — the just distribution of wealth and "political arithmetick" about taxes — became three discrete fields of human activity: Economics, Law, and Ethics, politics and economics divorced.
- "The economic formation of society is a process of natural history", thus it is possible for a political economist to objectively study the scientific laws of capitalism, given that its expansion of the market system of commerce had objectified human economic relations; the use of money (cash nexus) voided religious and political illusions about its economic value, and replaced them with commodity fetishism, the belief that an object (commodity) has inherent economic value. Because societal economic formation is a historical process, no one person could control or direct it, thereby creating a global complex of social connections among capitalists;[citation needed] thus, the economic formation (individual commerce) of a society precedes the human administration of an economy (organised commerce).
- The structural contradictions of a capitalist economy, the gegensätzliche Bewegung, describe the contradictory movement originating from the two-fold character of labour, and so the class struggle between labour and capital, the wage labourer and the owner of the means of production. These capitalist economic contradictions operate "behind the backs" of the capitalists and the workers, as a result of their activities, and yet remain beyond their immediate perceptions as men and women and as social classes.
- The economic crises (recession, depression, etc.) that are rooted in the contradictory character of the economic value of the commodity (cell-unit) of a capitalist society, are the conditions that propitiate proletarian revolution; which the Communist Manifesto (1848) collectively identified as a weapon, forged by the capitalists, which the working class "turned against the bourgeoisie, itself".
- In a capitalist economy, technological improvement and its consequent increased production augment the amount of material wealth (use value) in society, whilst simultaneously diminishing the economic value of the same wealth, thereby diminishing the rate of profit — a paradox characteristic of economic crisis in a capitalist economy; "poverty in the midst of plenty" consequent to over-production and under-consumption.