Karl Marx Biography
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Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier,
Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German
philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the
International Workingmen's Association. While Marx addressed a wide
range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms
of class struggles, summed up in the famous opening line of the
introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggle."
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Biography
Early life
Karl Marx was born into a progressive and
wealthy Jewish family in Prussian Trier, Germany. His father Herschel,
descending from a long line of rabbis, was a lawyer and Herschel's
brother Samuel was—like many of his ancestors—chief rabbi of Trier. In
1817, before Karl's birth, Herschel Marx converted to the Prussian state
religion of Lutheranism to keep his position as a lawyer, which he had
gained under the Napoleonic regime. The Marx family was very liberal and
the Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during
Karl's early life.
Education
Marx received good marks in gymnasium, the
Prussian secondary education school. His senior thesis, which
anticipated his later development of a social analysis of religion, was
a treatise entitled "Religion: The Glue That Binds Society Together",
for which he won a prize.
In 1833 Marx enrolled in the University of
Bonn to study law, at his father's behest. He joined the Trier Tavern
Club and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as he
spent most of his time singing songs in beer halls (McLellen 17). The
following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more
serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in
Berlin (now known as the Humboldt University).
Marx and the Young Hegelians
In Berlin, Marx's interests turned to
philosophy, much to his father's dismay, and he joined the circle of
students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians", led by
Bruno Bauer. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between
post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. Another Young
Hegelian, Max Stirner, applied Hegelian criticism and argued that
stopping anywhere short of nihilistic egoism was mysticism. His views
were not accepted by most of his colleagues, and Karl Marx responded in
parts of Die Deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology), but decided not
to publish it. Nevertheless Stirner's book was the main reason Marx
abandoned the Feuerbachian view and developed the basic concept of
historical materialism.
Georg Hegel died in 1831, and during his
lifetime was an extremely influential figure at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität
and in German academia in general. The Hegelian establishment (known as
the Right Hegelians) in place at Friedrich-Wilhelms maintained that the
series of historical dialectics had been completed, and that Prussian
society as it existed was the culmination of all social development to
date, with an extensive civil service system, good universities,
industrialization, and high employment. The Young Hegelians with whom
Marx was associated believed that there were still further dialectical
changes to come, and that the Prussian society of the time was far from
perfect as it still contained some pockets of poverty, government
sponsored censorship and discrimination against non-Lutherans.
Marx was told not to submit his doctoral
dissertation at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, as it would
certainly be poorly received there due to his reputation as a Young
Hegelian radical. Marx instead submitted his dissertation, which
compared the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus, to the
University of Jena in 1840, where it was accepted.
Career
When his mentor Bruno Bauer was dismissed
from the philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned philosophy for
journalism and went on to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne
newspaper. After the newspaper was shut in 1843, in part due to Marx's
conflicts with government censors, Marx returned to philosophy, turned
to political activism, and made his living as a freelance journalist.
Marx soon moved, however, something he would do often as a result of his
views.
Marx first moved to France, where he
re-evaluated his relationship with Bauer and the Young Hegelians, and
wrote On the Jewish Question, mostly a critique of current notions of
civil rights and political emancipation. It was in Paris that he met and
began working with his life-long close friend and collaborator Friedrich
Engels, a theorist and (in years to come) a committed Communist, who
called Marx's attention to the situation of the working class and guided
Marx's interest in economics. After he was forced to leave Paris for his
writings, he and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium.
There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a
critique of the philosophy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. Marx next
wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a critique of French socialist
thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most
famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21,
1848, which was commissioned by the Communist League (formerly, the
League of the Just), an organization of German émigrés whom Marx had
coveted in London.
That year Europe experienced revolutionary
upheaval; a working-class movement seized power from King Louis Philippe
in France and invited Marx to return to Paris. When this government
collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and restarted the
Rheinische Zeitung, only to be swiftly expelled again. Marx's final move
was to London. In 1852 Marx wrote his famous pamphlet The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which he analyzed Napoleon III's
takeover of France. From 1852 to 1861, while in London, Marx contributed
to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune as its European correspondent.
First International and Gladstone quote
In 1863, Chancellor of the Exchequer
William Ewart Gladstone gave a budget speech to Parliament in which he
commented on the increase in the United Kingdom's national wealth, and
added (according to the report of the speech in The Times), "I should
look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating
augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that it was
confined to the class who are in easy circumstances. This takes no
cognizance at all of the condition of the laboring population. The
augmentation I have described and which is founded, I think, upon
accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes
possessed of property." But, in the semi-official version published in
Hansard, Gladstone deleted the final sentence (editing the Hansard
version was a common practice among Members of Parliament).
In 1864 Marx organized the International
Workingmen's Association, later called the First International, as a
base for continued political activism. In his inaugural address, he
purported to quote Gladstone's speech, to the effect that, "This
intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to
classes of property." He repeated the citation in Volume 1 of Capital.
The discrepancy between Marx's quote and the Hansard version of the
speech (which was well-known) was soon employed in an attempt to
discredit the International. Marx attempted to rebut the accusations of
dishonesty, but the allegation continued to resurface. Marx later gave
as his source the newspaper The Morning Star.
Engels devoted a good deal of attention to
the affair in the preface to the fourth edition of Capital — which,
likewise, did not put the matter to rest. Engels claimed that it was not
The Morning Star but The Times that Marx was following. Indeed, critics
of Marxism such as the journalist Paul Johnson continue to invoke Marx's
supposed misquotation as evidence of general dishonesty. One can find a
straightforward unravelling of this dispute in David A. Felix's work,
Marx As Politician (London, 1983).
The International survived the controversy,
however, collapsing in 1872 in part because of the fall of the Paris
Commune, and in part because many members turned to Mikhail Bakunin's
anarchism. In London throughout this period, Marx also dedicated himself
to the historical and theoretical research behind Das Kapital (Capital:
A Critique of Political Economy). Marx published the first volume in
1867. The remaining two volumes of Capital were never completed by Marx,
but were reconstructed by Engels from extensive notes and drafts, and
published posthumously.
Family Life
Marx's wife, Jenny von Westphalen, came
from an aristocratic family. Karl's engagement to Jenny was kept secret
at first, and for several years it was opposed by both the Marxes and
Westphalens.
Jenny and Karl had many children, several
of whom died young. Their daughter Eleanor (1855-1898), born in London,
was a committed socialist and helped edit her father's works.
Jenny Marx died in December, 1881.
Later life
Marx was generally impoverished during the
later period of his life, depending on financial contributions from a
close friend, Friedrich Engels, to help with his family's living
expenses and debts. Marx died in London in the year 1883, and is buried
in Highgate Cemetery, London. The message carved on Marx's tombstone - a
monument built in 1954 by the British Communist Party - is: "Workers of
all lands, unite". Marx's original tomb was humbly adorned.
Influences on Marx's thought
Marx's thought was strongly influenced
by:
the dialectical historicism of Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
the classical political economy of Adam
Smith and David Ricardo.
French socialist and sociological thought.
Marx believed that he could study history
and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the
resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded,
therefore, that a communist revolution is inevitable. However, Marx
famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point however is to change it", and he clearly
dedicated himself to trying to alter the world. Consequently, most
followers of Marx are not fatalists, but activists who believe that
revolutionaries must organize social change.
Marx's view of history, which came to be
called the materialist interpretation of history (and which was
developed further as the philosophy of dialectical materialism) is
certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should
be viewed dialectically, through a clash of opposing forces. Hegel
believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the
movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which
was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes,
Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves
gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires
discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against the
existing status quo. While Marx accepted this broad conception of
history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in
materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of
reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet.
Marx's acceptance of this notion of
materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly
influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity,
Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the
qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity.
Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and
that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus,
like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between
appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world
hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought
that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from
seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.
The other important contribution to Marx's
revision of Hegelianism was Engels' book, The Condition of the Working
Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive of the historical
dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class
as the most progressive force for revolution.
Marx's philosophy
As the reputable American Marx scholar Hal
Draper remarked, there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought
has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike.
Indeed, shortly before his death, Marx himself said, in response to
so-called 'marxists' who supported reform instead of revolution,
something to the effect of "if that is Marxism, then I am not a
Marxist". Subsequently, the merger of Marxist thought with Leninism,
forming the official state ideology (Marxism-Leninism) of the Soviet
bloc, arguably departed further from Marx's own beliefs and analyses.
However, following the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet bloc, there has
been a return by non-Marxists to Marx's own writing, in particular for
insights in his analysis of capitalism that are still relevant today.
The notion of labour is fundamental in
Marx's thought. Basically, Marx argued that it is human nature to
transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour"
and the capacity to transform nature labour power. For Marx, this is a
natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to
the human mind and human imagination:
A spider conducts operations that resemble
those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the
construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect
from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure
in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap.
7, Pt. 1)
Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic
and, with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human
nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting “nature”
with “history”. Sometimes they use the phrase “existence precedes
consciousness”. The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is
determined by where and when he is — social context takes precedence
over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of
human nature is adaptability.
Marx did not believe that all people worked
the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual.
Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the
conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially
determined and change over time.
Marx's analysis of history is based on his
distinction between the means / forces of production, literally those
things, such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are
necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of
production, in other words, the social and technical relationships
people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production.
Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that
within any given society the mode of production changes, and that
European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a
capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the means
of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for
example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only
later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this
mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major
source of social disruption and conflict.
Marx understood the "social relations of
production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but
between or among groups of people, or classes. As a scientist and
materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in
other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one
another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria,
such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have
divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and
conflict.
Marx was especially concerned with how
people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour-power.
Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation.
As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation
but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility
that one may give up ownership of one's own labour — one's capacity to
transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own
nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of
commodity fetishism, in which people come to believe that it is the very
things that they produce that are powerful, and the sources of power and
creativity, rather than people themselves. He argued that when this
happens, people begin to mediate all their relationships among
themselves and with others through commodities.
Commodity fetishism is an example of what
Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the
understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the
interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but
which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was
not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an
important political function. Put another way, the control that one
class exercises over the means of production includes not only the
production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of
ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of
a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests).
Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some
truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that
the things people produce are actually more productive than the people
who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact
(according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are
alienated from their own labour-power. Another example of this sort of
analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage
from the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
Religious suffering is, at one and the same
time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real
suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of
a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium
of the people.
Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued
that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity,
here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping
with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.
Critique of capitalism
Marx argued that this alienation of human
work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining
feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe
where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to
Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor
itself became a commodity — when peasants became free to sell their own
labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their
own land or tools necessary to produce. People sell their labor-power
when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a
given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product
of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their
labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who
must sell their labor power to live are "proletarians." The person who
buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and
technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois." (Marx
considered this an objective description of capitalism, distinct from
any one of a variety of ideological claims of or about capitalism). The
proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.
Marx distinguished industrial capitalists
from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one place and sell
them in another; more precisely, they buy things in one market and sell
them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within
given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a
commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice
arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets.
According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the
difference between the labor market and the market for whatever
commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in
practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than
output unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and
argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour.
The capitalist mode of production is
capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an
incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the
capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it
constantly revolutionized the means of production. But Marx argued that
capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time,
capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and
less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from
labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit
would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below
a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which
certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx understood that
during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually
make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new
sectors of the economy.
Marx believed that this cycle of growth,
collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises.
Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was
necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and
the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the
proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage
social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of
production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought
that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a
massive, well-organized and violent revolution was required by
necessity. Finally, he theorized that to maintain the socialist system,
a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the
working-class will be the common deciding factor, not that of capital -
must be established and maintained.
Critique of bourgeois democracy and of
anti-Semitism
Some scholars have presented an alternative
reading of Marx, primarily based on his essay On the Jewish Question.
Economist Tyler Cowen, historian Marvin Perry, and political scientist
Joshua Muravchik have suggested that what they see as an intense hatred
for the "Jewish Class" was part of Marx's belief that if he could
convince his contemporaries and the public to hate Jewish capitalists,
the public would eventually come to hate non-Jewish capitalists as well.
Most scholars reject this claim for two
reasons: first, it is based on two short essays written in the 1840s,
and ignores the bulk of Marx's analysis of capitalism written in the
following years. Second, it distorts the argument of On the Jewish
Question, in which Marx deconstructs liberal notions of emancipation.
During the Enlightenment, philosophers and political theorists argued
that religious authority had been oppressing human beings, and that
religion must be separated from the functions of the state for people to
be truly free. Following the French Revolution, many people were thus
calling for the emancipation of the Jews.
At the same time, many argued that
Christianity is a more enlightened and advanced religion than Judaism.
For example, Marx's former mentor, Bruno Bauer, argued that Christians
need to be emancipated only once (from Christianity), and Jews need to
be emancipated twice — first from Judaism (presumably, by converting to
Christianity), then from religion altogether.
Marx rejects Bauer's argument as a form of
Christian ethnocentrism, if not anti-Semitic. Marx proceeds to turn
Bauer's language, and the rhetoric of anti-Semites, upside down to make
a more progressive argument. First, he points out that Bruno Bauer's
argument is too parochial because it considers Christianity to be more
evolved than Judaism, and because it narrowly defines the problem that
requires emancipation to be religion. Marx instead argues that the issue
is not religion, but capitalism. Pointing out that anti-Semitic
stereotypes of Jews are fundamentally anti-capitalist, Marx provides a
theory of anti-Semitism by suggesting that anti-Semites scapegoat Jews
for capitalism because too many non-Jews benefit from, or are invested
in capitalism, to attack capitalism directly.
Marx also uses this rhetoric ironically to
develop his critique of bourgeois notions of emancipation. Marx points
out that the bourgeois notion of freedom is predicated on choice (in
politics, through elections; in the economy, through the market), but
that this form of freedom is anti-social and alienating. Although Bauer
and other liberals believe that emancipation means freedom to choose,
Marx argues that this is at best a very narrow notion of freedom. Thus,
what Bauer believes would be the emancipation of the Jews is for Marx
actually alienation, not emancipation. After explaining that he is not
referring to real Jews or to the Jewish religion, Marx appropriates this
anti-Semitic rhetoric against itself (in a way that parallels his
Hegelian argument that capitalism contains the seeds of its own
destruction) by using "Judaism" ironically as a metaphor for capitalism.
In this sense, Marx states, all Europeans are "Jewish". This is a pun on
two levels. First, if the Jews must be emancipated, Marx is saying that
all Europeans must be emancipated. Second, if by "Judaism" one really
means "capitalism," then far from Jews needing to be emancipated from
Christianity (as Bauer called for), Christians need to be emancipated
from Judaism (meaning, bourgeois society). See: works by historian Hal
Draper and David McLellan. See also: Roots of anti-Semitism: Karl Marx's
On the Jewish Question.
Marx's influence
Marx and Engels' work covers a wide range
of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in
terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on
this work to propose a political and economic philosophy dubbed Marxism.
Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how
to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current
events and conditions (and it is important to distinguish between
"Marxism" and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly before he died
in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde,
and to Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary
phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles; "if
that is Marxism" — paraphrasing what Marx wrote — "then I am not a
Marxist"). Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to describe those
who rely on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. mode of production, class,
commodity fetishism) to understand capitalist and other societies, or to
describe those who believe that a workers' revolution is the only means
to a communist society.
Six years after Marx's death, Engels and
others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued
political activism. This organization collapsed in 1914, in part because
some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary" socialism, and
in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I.
World War I also led to the Russian
Revolution and the consequent ascendance of Vladimir Lenin's leadership
of the communist movement, embodied in the "Third International". Lenin
claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and
developed a political program, called Leninism or Bolshevism, which
called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized
Communist Party.
After Lenin's death, the Secretary-General
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, seized
control of the Party and state apparatus. He argued that before a
world-wide communist revolution would be possible, the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union had to dedicate itself to building communism in its
own country. It was Stalin's Soviet Union and its policies that
undermined the concept of Marxism in the Western world. For many years,
especially after the Second World War during the Cold War period,
Marxism was popularly equated with communism, which in turn was
understood as a political totalitarianism disregarding civil rights.
In 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the
Soviet Union and in 1938 founded the competing "Fourth International."
Some followers of Trotsky argued that Stalin had created a bureaucratic
state rather than a socialist state.
In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an
heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could play a
leading role in a Communist revolution. This was a profound departure
from Marx's own view of revolution, which focused exclusively on the
urban proletariat, and which he believed would take place in advanced
industrial societies such as France, Germany and England.
Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as
Maoism.
In the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident
Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among
them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse.
As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School. Their
work is known as Critical Theory, a type of Marxist philosophy and
cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and
Max Weber.
The Frankfurt School broke with earlier
Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First,
writing at the time of the ascendance of Stalinism and Fascism, they had
grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class
consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they
rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work is
often criticized for reducing Marxism to a purely academic enterprise.
Other influential non-Bolshevik Marxists at
that time include Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, who
along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western
Marxism. Also prominent during this period was the German revolutionary
Rosa Luxemburg. Henryk Grossman, who elaborated the mathematical basis
of Marx's 'law of capitalist breakdown', was another contemporary.
In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman
founded Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for
Marxist thought in the United States independent of the Communist Party.
In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend
Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by
reconstructing it through the lens of analytic philosophy. This gave
birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic movement which also included
Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another
Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy.
In July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner
of the 'Greatest Philosopher of All Time' poll by listeners of BBC Radio
4.
Contemporary criticism
Many proponents of capitalism have argued
that capitalism is a more effective means of generating and
redistributing wealth than socialism or communism, and that the gulf
between rich and poor that concerned Marx and Engels was a temporary
phenomenon. Some suggest that greed and the need to acquire capital is
an inherent component of human behavior, and is not caused by the
adoption of capitalism or any other specific economic system (although
economic anthropologists have questioned this assertion) and that
different economic systems reflect different social responses to this
fact. The Austrian School of economics has criticized Marx's use of the
labor theory of value. In addition, the political repression and
economic problems of several historical socialist states have done much
to destroy Marx's reputation in the Western world, particularly
following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet
Union.
Marx has also been criticized from the
Left. Evolutionary socialists and social democrats reject his claim that
socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and violent
revolution. Others argue that class is not the most fundamental
inequality in history and call attention to patriarchy or race. However,
Marxists argue that these inequalities are linked to class and therefore
will largely cease to exist after the formation of a classless society.
Some today question the theoretical and historical validity of "class"
as an analytic construct or as a political actor. In this line, some
question Marx's reliance on 19th century notions that linked science
with the idea of "progress" (see social evolution). Many observe that
capitalism has changed much since Marx's time, and that class
differences and relationships are much more complex — citing as one
example the fact that much corporate stock in the United States is owned
by workers through pension funds (Even though it is widely known that
the top 1% of wage earners own more than 50% of the nation's publicly
traded company stocks).
Still others criticize Marx from the
perspective of philosophy of science. Karl Popper has criticized Marx's
theories as he believed they were not falsifiable, which he argued would
render some particular aspects of Marx’s historical and socio-political
arguments unscientific. Primarily, this stems from Marx's assertion that
class revolt will be part of the process in overcoming capitalism. The
argument goes that the critic says "this will not happen" to which the
reply is "but it will." However it has been argued that such statements
show a simplistic understanding or a deliberate misinterpretation,
because the reply has no basis in what Marx actually said.
A common critique of Marx points out that
the increasing class antagonisms he predicted never actually developed
in the Western world following industrialization. While socioeconomic
gaps between the bourgeoisie and proleteriat remained, industrialization
in countries such as the United States and Great Britain also saw the
rise of a middle class not inclined to violent revolution, and of a
welfare state that helped contain any revolutionary tendencies among the
working class. While the economic devastation of the Great Depression
broadened the appeal of Marxism in the developed world, future
government safeguards and economic recovery led to a decline in its
influence. In contrast, Marxism remained extremely influential in feudal
and industrially underdeveloped societies such as Czarist Russia, where
the Bolshevik Revolution was successful.
Marxist political parties and movements
have significantly declined since the fall of the Soviet Union. Critics
argue that the Soviet Union's numerous internal failings and subsequent
collapse were a direct result of the practical failings of Marxism, but
modern-day Marxists, especially Trotskyists, respond to this by pointing
out that the Soviet Union's political system did not actually resemble
true socialism at all. Marx analyzed the world of his day and refused to
draw up plans of how a future socialist society should be run saying he
did not "write recipes...for cook-shops of the future." Outside Europe
and the United States, communism has generally been superseded by
anti-colonialist and nationalist struggles which sometimes appeal to
Marx for theoretical support.
Contemporary supporters of Marx argue most
generally that Marx was correct that human behavior reflects determinate
historical and social conditions (and is therefore changing and can not
be understood in terms of some universal "human nature"). More
specifically, they argue his analysis of commodities is still useful and
that alienation is still a problem.
****
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Date Article Copied:
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