Marx, Karl (1818—83)
German Jewish economist and social theorist and one of the most influential thinkers of all time. Marx was born in the Rhineland town of Trier shortly after it was returned to Prussian rule. As the Prussian state was much less tolerant of Jews than were its previous rulers, the French, Marx’s father converted to Christianity in order to continue to be able to work as a lawyer. Marx studied law at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, but despite his father’s wishes he never became a lawyer. He obtained a PhD from the University of Jena, but the political situation in Prussia made it impossible for him to pursue an academic career, so he instead turned to journalism and took a job with the Cologne‐based liberal newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, becoming its editor at the age of 24. It was in the offices of the Rheinische Zeitung that he met his future collaborator and benefactor Engels, Friedrich in 1842. Marx used his editorial position to publicly critique the monarchical state, which retaliated by censoring his columns and effectively forcing the paper to close. Following the closure of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx took another editorial job in Paris in 1843, hoping to find there greater freedom to write and think. Marx’s so-called ‘early writings’, On the Jewish Question (1843), A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (1843—4), and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), among other works, date from this period. These early works set the philosophical tone for much of what followed by initiating Marx’s attack on philosophy (particularly Hegelian philosophy) for proceeding from the abstract to the concrete, i.e. from ideas about reality to reality, and not the other way round. This way of proceeding, he argued, encourages the passive acceptance of injustice because it equates actual states of things with the ideal state of things. He also rejected Hegel’s use of the term ‘spirit’ as a way of narrating human history as the evolution of consciousness because it obscures actual human agency. As Marx would later insist, humans make history, but not in conditions of their own choosing. For Hegel’s evolution of consciousness Marx substituted the real historical processes of economic production, exploited labour, ruling classes, and class struggle. In contrast to idealist philosophers like Hegel, Marx’s work responded to the transformations of society then being brought about by the growing industrialization of the economy that was sweeping across Europe thanks to the heady combination of new productive technologies (such as the steam engine) and the global expansion of markets (due to colonialism). Expelled from France in 1845, Marx moved to Brussels. There he became involved with the international movement, the Communist League. The League held two conferences in London in 1847, following which Marx and Engels (who had already begun collaborating on an unfinished project that was later published as The German Ideology) were assigned the task of preparing a manifesto to guide the nascent movement. Engels wrote the initial drafts, and Marx wrote up the final manuscript, which was published in German in London in 1848. A French translation soon followed, as did an English translation in 1850. Yet, despite the fact that 1848 was a turbulent year in Europe (the insurrection in Paris, which affected both Baudelaire and Flaubert so deeply, being the most prominent), Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, translated as The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1850) had little immediate impact on revolutionary thought or practice. Ultimately, though, it would become one of the most influential and indeed consequential books ever written, as the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century unfolded. That many of these turned out to be disastrous for millions of people rather than the liberating triumphs Marx and Engels predicted cannot be blamed on them, though it frequently is. The Communist Manifesto contended not only that capitalist production was exploitative of labour, but that it was transforming society itself by overturning traditional forms of production, social ties, and the old hierarchies of social relations. Presciently, they argued that this new form of industrial capitalism was creating world history for the first time (or what we would now term globalization) because now all industrial nations were so interlinked for the production of goods that no one nation was any longer capable of satisfying all its needs. Surprisingly, perhaps, Marx and Engels saw these transformations in a positive light: to their eyes, capitalism benefited society by smashing all the old traditions, which they saw as suffocating, and by expanding the productive capacity of society, thus ending worries about food security and creating full employment. But it was also only the first step towards a proletarian revolution in which the people would rise up and take control of this newly created society. Owing to the failure of the liberal revolutions in Europe in 1848 and 1849, both Marx and Engels were forced to flee to England, where they remained until their deaths. Engels found employment in the family firm, overseeing its interests in textile manufacturing and marketing in Manchester. Supported by Engels, Marx settled in London, near to the vast resources of the library in the British Museum, which opened in 1857 and contained over 40 kilometres of shelving (the library itself has since been moved to St Pancras, but Marx’s favourite desk is preserved in the now mummified ‘reading room’). Marx also wrote hundreds of short articles for various English and German newspapers on diverse topics of contemporary and historical interest, including Britain’s imperial occupation of India. His notebooks from the winter of 1857—8, largely compiled whilst seated in the British Museum, were published posthumously as the Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) (1939), translated as Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (1973). Here one sees Marx throw off the influence of Hegel once and for all and begin the process that would lead to the writing of his master work Das Kapital: Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Capital: Critique of Political Economy). From the Grundrisse onwards Marx’s work became increasingly minutely focused on the precise economic mechanisms of the capitalist system, which he always understood in political terms. He admired the productive capacity of capitalism and the way it unleashed tremendous productive forces, but he also saw that the system was innately unequal in its distribution of prosperity and ultimately exploitative. More importantly, perhaps, Marx also saw that the logic of capitalist production was such that it was bound to swing from one crisis to another because its very premise, namely the endless pursuit of profit, was destabilizing. Throughout the 1860s Marx worked on, but never completed and only sporadically published, what would come to be known simply as Das Kapital. The first volume appeared in 1867, and was the only volume to appear in Marx’s lifetime; the other two volumes were published posthumously under Engels’s editorship (a fourth volume was written, but it was published by Kautsky, Karl under the separate title of Theories of Surplus Value) in 1884 and 1894 respectively. His aim in writing Das Kapital was to understand how capitalism works as a political system, not just an economic system. At the centre of this book, though, is Marx’s fascination with the enigma of the commodity: it is an enigma because people willingly pay more for certain commodities than their use value dictates. He described this situation as a kind of fetishism. For example, as Naomi Klein demonstrated in her book No Logo (2000), people pay substantially more for certain items because they have a particular brand label attached to them, even though the same item---minus the brand---could be had for a much lower cost. Thus, he argued, commodities have to be understood in terms of exchange value (what someone is willing to pay for something) and not use value (the material value of an item calculated in terms of what could be done with it). But if something is valuable only in terms of exchange---if it is the exchange that determines its value---then the thing no longer has any intrinsic value, thus raising the question: What then gives it value? His somewhat cryptic answer is labour conceived as socially useful time (and not just physical or mental effort)---labour to produce the commodity (which is seen as dead or stored labour) and labour to acquire the capital to purchase the commodity. Marx’s health deteriorated throughout the 1870s, slowing down his rate of work, which had always been prodigious and painstaking, preventing him from finishing his project. Fortunately Engels was able to oversee his legacy. Marx’s influence on critical theory is immense, albeit uneven. Indeed, his legacy can be seen in the very constitution of critical theory, particularly in its earliest formulation by the Frankfurt School, in the attention it gives to the real-world considerations of economics and politics. His work has also had a significant influence on literary criticism, via the work of artists like Brecht, Bertolt and scholars such as Lukács, György, Macherey, Pierre, Eagleton, Terry, Jameson, Fredric, and others, and history, through the work of Anderson, Perry and Hobsbawm, Eric, among many others. Philosophers like Sartre, Jean-Paul, Derrida, Jacques, and Deleuze, Gilles all claim as an essential resource Marx’s contribution to political thought. Like any great thinker, Marx has given rise to rival schools of thought, some of which---like Althusser, Louis’s followers---became highly influential in their own right, as well as powerful opponents. Outside academia, Marx’s work has proven to be a powerful intellectual and ideological weapon in the hands of the oppressed everywhere. Further Reading: E. Balibar The Philosophy of Marx (2007). D. Harvey A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010). P. Osborne How to Read Marx (2005). F. Wheen Karl Marx (2000).