essays on karl marx

Karl Marx: Biography, Works, Contributions, Criticisms, and Beliefs

Karl Marx : Although Sociology as a discipline emerged much after Karl Marx’s death, and he had no connection to the subject matter itself, Marx has been assigned the status of a classical thinker in Sociology, and his theories continue to be examined and analyzed voraciously by sociologists and students of sociology. This article provides an insight into the life, some major works, and criticisms of the theories s of one of the most celebrated, debated, and studied figures.

Introduction to Karl Marx :

Personal Life

Educational Background

Marx’s studied at the high school in his hometown Trier, before which Heinrich taught Marx privately. The Trier High School was often put under surveillance by the local government for promoting liberal ideas among its staff and students. Marx was educated in his later years in Law, History, and Philosophy. In 1835, he was admitted to the University of Bonn. Following a series of hostilities, which Marx got engaged in during his time at Bonn, Marx relocated college to the University of Berlin in 1836 to undertake the subjects of Law and Philosophy (along with History). It was here that Marx was introduced to the ideas of German Philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel, and joined the group of radical thinkers called ‘Young Hegelians’. Hegel played one of the most significant roles in influencing Marx’s theoretical system known as ‘Historical Materialism’, which is the foundation for a majority of Marx’s works. Marx earned a doctorate in Philosophy in 1841 from the University of Jena.

Marx’s career in academia was jeopardized as a consequence of the conservative ministry of education in Berlin placing an embargo on Marx for being a radical. However, he found a place as a writer in the liberal newspaper circulated in Cologne, the hotbed of industrial advancement in Prussia, called ‘ Rheinische Zeitung ’, and later became the editor of the same in October 1842. During his career at the newspaper, Marx wrote on a variety of topics such as press freedom, the vices of censorship, poverty and destitution in Berlin, and the government’s appalling treatment of the indigent and the peasants. His excessive and unreserved criticism on these issues invited the disapproval of the authorities, and the newspaper was proscribed. In 1843, he got married to Jenny, and they both moved to Paris later in the year. In Paris, he got acquainted with the works of Henri de Saint-Simon, a French Philosopher whose views set off the formation of Christian Socialism, as well as those of Adam Smith, a political Economist, and David Ricardo. Marx’s friendship with Friedrich Engels, whom he first made acquaintance with during his work at the  Rheinische Zeitung,  also deepened. This marked the beginning of a journey of partnership and bond of friendship between the two which would persist through the entirety of their lifetimes. Marx’s vehement journalism once again attracted the umbrage of the government, and he was forced to change cities. He moved to Brussels, where, along with his friend Engels, he published two of his most paramount works, namely, ‘ The German Ideology ’ and ‘ The Communist Manifesto ’, along with others such as ‘ The Poverty of Philosophy ’ and ‘ The Holy Family ’, published in 1847 and 1845 respectively. Marx also became associated with the League of the Just, which was later renamed to Communist League. During the workers’ protest that ensued during 1848, Marx and Engels went back to Rhineland, where, in Cologne, they co-contributed to the paper ‘ Neue Rheinische Zeitung ’ started in 1849. Put on trial for arousing and supporting revolts and for participating in the vilification of the royal family of Prussia, Marx was ousted from the country, and also had to leave Paris. With his wife and children, he settled in London. Once there, he immersed himself into writing, mainly focusing on economics, and producing such works as ‘Capital’ (also known as ‘ Das Kapital ’). Marx also established and directed the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, the main purpose of which was to abolish the atrocities under capitalism.

Throughout most of his career, Marx had to rely on financial aids from others, among which was his friend, Friedrich Engels, who provided Marx monetary assistance during his years in London. With rapidly declining health, and lack of means to sustain themselves, Jenny and Marx passed away on December 2, 1881, and March 14, 1883, respectively.

Major Influences on Marx’s Ideology :

Apart from the conditions of the society during his lifetime, and the circumstances in which he grew up, Marx’s thinking which was reflected in his writings were largely inspired by the ideas of several people throughout his life. The following people, along with a few others, were the ones who made the most significant impact on Marx:

In addition to these, others such as Immanuel Kant, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Charles Fourier, Charles Darwin, and his friend, Friedrich Engels’s also made a mark on Marx.

Marx’s Contributions to Sociology :

Read: Das Kapital – Summary

Criticism of Marxism ( Karl Marx) :

Karl Popper, one of the most notable philosophers of the 20 th century, proposed the ‘Falsification Principle’ or the ‘Theory of Falsification’ to determine what can be considered ‘science’ and what else can be considered ‘pseudoscience’. According to Popper’s critique of Karl Marx’s theory, it is a pseudoscience because it cannot be proven false. Karl Popper also said that Marx’s theories try to give a prediction of future events without any substantiated proof. Others such as Leszek Kołakowski, a Polish philosopher, contend that in identifying the social facts as they were, Marx fails to recognize certain basic human conditions such as life and death, etc. Other critiques of Marx’s theories include Max Weber, Robert C. Allen, Jean-Paul Sartre, and John Maynard Keynes.

What did Karl Marx believe in simple terms

Next, Marx believed that despite the unequal power and resource division between the private owners and the laborers, the working class is in a constant state of struggle against the bourgeoisie. Marx believed that a time in the future of people will arrive when the working class or the proletariats will have all the power in their hands, i.e., those who actually do the work will also have control over the resources. That brings us to Communism. As proclaimed by Marx, communism will be that ‘ideal’ structure of social order which takes away the power from the bourgeoisie and redistributes it among the working class and common people. Marx also believed that capitalism can be overthrown only when all people of the working class, regardless of their nationalities, come together and revolt against it. This is declared towards the end of ‘The Communist Manifesto’.

Read: Difference Between Socialism and Communism

Practise Question and Answer

“Religion is the opium of masses and an instrument of classes.” Critically analyze.

(1) Promising rewards in the next birth or afterlife.

(3) Through theories like karma, one believes that the oppressor will get divine justice.

(2) caste system in India.

(3) Religion is a means to develop false consciousness, thus prevents the proletariat from recognising the true cause of their sufferings and uniting in a proletariat revolution.

(5) Louis Althuser calls religion as a part of ideological state apparatus.

(6) ‘Divine right to rule’ of the monarchy → in medieval times.

Bildt, C. (2018, May 10). Why Marx was wrong . The Strategist. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/why-marx-was-wrong/

Feuer, L. S., & McLellan, D. T. (2021). Karl Marx. In Encyclopedia Britannica . https://www.britannica.com/biography/

Keynes, J. M. (1963). Essays in persuasion (p. 300). W. W. Norton & Company.

Leopold, D. (2018, August 30). Alienation . The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alienation/

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1992). The communist manifesto (D. Mclellan, Ed.). Oxford University Press.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1998). The german ideology : Including theses on feuerbach and introduction to the critique of political economy . Prometheus Books. (Original work published 1932)

Mommsen, W. J. (1977). Max weber as a critic of marxism. Canadian Journal of Sociology , 2 (4), 373. https://doi.org/10.2307/3340296

O’Hara, P. A. (1997). Veblen’s critique of Marx’s philosophical preconceptions of political economy. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought , 4 (1), 65–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/10427719700000020

Thornton, S. (2021). Karl Popper . Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/

Wolff, J., & Leopold, D. (2020). Karl Marx . The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/

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Karl Marx (1818–1883) is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than a philosopher, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is certainly hard to find many thinkers who can be said to have had comparable influence in the creation of the modern world. However, Marx was trained as a philosopher, and although often portrayed as moving away from philosophy in his mid-twenties—perhaps towards history and the social sciences—there are many points of contact with modern philosophical debates throughout his writings.

The themes picked out here include Marx’s philosophical anthropology, his theory of history, his economic analysis, his critical engagement with contemporary capitalist society (raising issues about morality, ideology, and politics), and his prediction of a communist future.

Marx’s early writings are dominated by an understanding of alienation, a distinct type of social ill whose diagnosis looks to rest on a controversial account of human nature and its flourishing. He subsequently developed an influential theory of history—often called historical materialism—centred around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx increasingly became preoccupied with an attempt to understand the contemporary capitalist mode of production, as driven by a remorseless pursuit of profit, whose origins are found in the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The precise role of morality and moral criticism in Marx’s critique of contemporary capitalist society is much discussed, and there is no settled scholarly consensus on these issues. His understanding of morality may be related to his account of ideology, and his reflection on the extent to which certain widely-shared misunderstandings might help explain the stability of class-divided societies. In the context of his radical journalism, Marx also developed his controversial account of the character and role of the modern state, and more generally of the relation between political and economic life. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a series of modes of production, characterised by (more or less explicit) class struggle, and driving humankind towards communism. However, Marx is famously reluctant to say much about the detailed arrangements of the communist alternative that he sought to bring into being, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined plan or blueprint.

1.1 Early Years

1.3 brussels, 2.1 the basic idea, 2.2 religion and work, 2.3 alienation and capitalism, 2.4 political emancipation, 2.5 remaining questions, 3.1 sources, 3.2 early formulations, 3.3 1859 preface, 3.4 functional explanation, 3.5 rationality, 3.6 alternative interpretations, 4.1 reading capital, 4.2 labour theory of value, 4.3 exploitation, 5.1 unpacking issues, 5.2 the “injustice” of capitalism, 5.3 communism and “justice”, 6.1 a critical account, 6.2 ideology and stability, 6.3 characteristics, 7.1 the state in capitalist society, 7.2. the fate of the state in communist society, 8.1 utopian socialism, 8.2 marx’s utopophobia, 9. marx’s legacy, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries, 1. life and writings.

Karl Marx was born in 1818, one of nine children. The family lived in the Rhineland region of Prussia, previously under French rule. Both of his parents came from Jewish families with distinguished rabbinical lineages. Marx’s father was a lawyer who converted to Christianity when it became necessary for him to do so if he was to continue his legal career.

Following an unexceptional school career, Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. His doctoral thesis was in ancient philosophy, comparing the philosophies of nature of Democritus (c.460–370 BCE) and Epicurus (341–270 BCE). From early 1842, he embarked on a career as a radical journalist, contributing to, and then editing, the Rheinische Zeitung , until the paper was closed by the Prussian authorities in April 1843.

Marx married Jenny von Westphalen (1814–1881), his childhood sweetheart, in June 1843. They would spend their lives together and have seven children, of whom just three daughters—Jenny (1844–1883), Laura (1845–1911), and Eleanor (1855–1898)—survived to adulthood. Marx is also widely thought to have fathered a child—Frederick Demuth (1851–1929)—with Helene Demuth (1820–1890), housekeeper and friend of the Marx family.

Marx’s adult life combined independent scholarship, political activity, and financial insecurity, in fluctuating proportions. Political conditions were such, that, in order to associate and write as he wished, he had to live outside of Germany for most of this time. Marx spent three successive periods of exile in the capital cities of France, Belgium, and England.

Between late 1843 and early 1845, Marx lived in Paris, a cosmopolitan city full of émigrés and radical artisans. He was subsequently expelled by the French government following Prussian pressure. In his last months in Germany and during this Paris exile, Marx produced a series of “early writings”, many not intended for publication, which significantly altered interpretations of his thought when they were published collectively in the twentieth century. Papers that actually saw publication during this period include: “On the Jewish Question” (1843) in which Marx defends Jewish Emancipation against Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), but also emphasises the limitations of “political” as against “human” emancipation; and the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” (1844) which contains a critical account of religion, together with some prescient remarks about the emancipatory potential of the proletariat. The most significant works that Marx wrote for self-clarification rather than publication in his Paris years are the so-called “1844 Manuscripts” (1844) which provide a suggestive account of alienation, especially of alienation in work; and the “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), a set of epigrammatic but rich remarks including reflections on the nature of philosophy.

Between early 1845 and early 1848, Marx lived in Brussels, the capital of a rapidly industrialising Belgium. A condition of his residency was to refrain from publishing on contemporary politics, and he was eventually expelled after political demonstrations involving foreign nationals took place. In Brussels Marx published The Holy Family (1845), which includes contributions from his new friend and close collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), continuing the attack on Bruno Bauer and his followers. Marx also worked, with Engels, on a series of manuscripts now usually known as The German Ideology (1845–46), a substantial section of which criticises the work of Max Stirner (1806–1856). Marx also wrote and published The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) which disparages the social theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865). All these publications characteristically show Marx developing and promoting his own views through fierce critical attacks on contemporaries, often better-known and more established than himself.

Marx was politically active throughout his adult life, although the events of 1848—during which time he returned to Paris and Cologne—inspired the first of two periods of especially intense activity. Two important texts here are The Communist Manifesto (1848) which Marx and Engels published just before the February Revolution, and, following his move to London, The Class Struggles in France (1850) in which Marx examined the subsequent failure of 1848 in France. Between these two dates, Marx commented on, and intervened in, the revolution in Germany through the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848–49), the paper he helped to establish and edit in Cologne.

For well over half of his adult life—from late 1849 until his death in 1883—Marx lived in London, a city providing a secure haven for political exiles and a superb vantage point from which to study the world’s most advanced capitalist economy. This third and longest exile was dominated by an intellectual and personal struggle to complete his critique of political economy, but his theoretical output extended far beyond that project.

Marx’s initial attempt to make sense of Napoleon III’s rise to power in contemporary France is contained in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Between 1852 and 1862 Marx also wrote well over three hundred articles for the New York Daily Tribune ; sometimes unfairly disparaged as merely income-generating journalism, they frequently contain illuminating attempts to explain contemporary European society and politics (including European interventions in India and China) to an American audience (helpfully) presumed to know little about them.

The second of Marx’s two especially intense periods of political activity—after the revolutions of 1848—centred on his involvement in the International Working Men’s Association between 1864 and 1874, and the events of the Paris Commune (1871), in particular. The character and lessons of the Commune—the short-lived, and violently suppressed, municipal rebellion that controlled Paris for several months in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war—are discussed in The Civil War in France (1871). Also politically important was Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875), in which he criticises the theoretical influence of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864) on the German labour movement, and portrays the higher stage of a future communist society as endorsing distribution according to “the needs principle”.

Marx’s critique of political economy remains controversial. He never succeeded in fixing and realising the wider project that he envisaged. Volume One of Capital , published in 1867, was the only significant part of the project published in his own lifetime, and even here he was unable to resist heavily reworking subsequent editions (especially the French version of 1872–75). What we now know as Volume Two and Volume Three of Capital were put together from Marx’s raw materials by Engels and published in 1885 and 1894, respectively, and Marx’s own drafts were written before the publication of Volume One and barely touched by him in the remaining fifteen years of his life. An additional three supplementary volumes planned by Engels, and subsequently called Theories of Surplus Value (or, more colloquially, the “fourth volume of Capital ”) were assembled from remaining notes by Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), and published between 1905 and 1910. (The section of the “new MEGA”—see below—concerned with Capital -related texts contains fifteen thick volumes, and provides some sense of the extent and character of these later editorial interventions.) In addition, the publication in 1953—a previous two-volume edition (1939 and 1941) had only a highly restricted circulation—of the so-called Grundrisse (written in 1857–58) was also important. Whether this text is treated as a freestanding work or as a preparatory step towards Capital, it raises many questions about Marx’s method, his relation to G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), and the evolution of Marx’s thought. In contrast, the work of political economy that Marx did publish in this period— A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)—was largely ignored by both contemporaries and later commentators, except for the, much reprinted and discussed, summary sketch of his theory of history that Marx offered in the so-called “1859 Preface” to that volume.

Marx’s later years (after the Paris Commune) are the subject of much interpretative disagreement. His inability to deliver the later volumes of Capital is often seen as emblematic of a wider and more systematic intellectual failure (Stedman Jones 2016). However, others have stressed Marx’s continued intellectual creativity in this period, as he variously rethought his views about: the core and periphery of the international economic system; the scope of his theory of history; social anthropology; and the economic and political evolution of Russia (Shanin 1983; K. Anderson 2010).

After the death of his wife, in 1881, Marx’s life was dominated by illness, and travel aimed at improving his health (convalescent destinations including the Isle of Wight, Karlsbad, Jersey, and Algiers). Marx died in March 1883, two months after the death of his eldest daughter. His estate was valued at £250.

Engels’s wider role in the evolution of, and, more especially the reception and interpretation of, Marx’s work is much disputed. The truth here is complex, and Engels is not always well-treated in the literature. Marx and Engels are sometimes portrayed as if they were a single entity, of one mind on all matters, whose individual views on any topic can be found simply by consulting the other. Others present Engels as the distorter and manipulator of Marx’s thought, responsible for any element of Marxian theory with which the relevant commentator might disagree. Despite their familiarity, neither caricature seems plausible or fair. The best-known jointly authored texts are The Holy Family , the “German Ideology” manuscripts, and The Communist Manifesto , but there are nearly two hundred shorter items that they both contributed to (Draper 1985: 2–19).

Many of Marx’s best-known writings remained unpublished before his death. The attempt to establish a reliable collected edition has proved lengthy and fraught. The authoritative Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe , the so-called “new MEGA” (1975–), is still a work in progress, begun under Soviet auspices but since 1990 under the guidance of the “International Marx-Engels Stiftung” (IMES). In its current form—much scaled-down from its original ambitions—the edition will contain some 114 volumes (well over a half of which are published at the time of writing). In addition to his various published and unpublished works, it includes Marx’s journalism, correspondence, drafts, and (some) notebooks. Texts are published in their original language (variously German, English, and French). For those needing to utilise English-language resources, the fifty volume Marx Engels Collected Works (1975–2004) can be recommended. (References to Marx and Engels quotations here are to these MECW volumes.) There are also several useful single volume selections of Marx and Engels writings in English (including Marx 2000).

2. Alienation and Human Flourishing

Alienation is a concept especially, but not uniquely, associated with Marx’s work, and the intellectual tradition that he helped found. It identifies a distinct kind of social ill, involving a separation between a subject and an object that properly belong together. The subject here is typically an individual or a group, while the object is usually an “entity” which variously is not itself a subject, is another subject(s), or is the original subject (that is, the relation here can be reflexive). And the relation between the relevant subject and object is one of problematic separation. Both elements of that characterisation are important. Not all social ills, of course, involve separations; for instance, being overly integrated into some object might be dysfunctional, but it is not characteristic of alienation. Moreover, not all separations are problematic, and accounts of alienation typically appeal to some baseline unity or harmony that is frustrated or violated by the separation in question.

Theories of alienation vary considerably, but frequently: first, identify a subset of these problematic separations as being of particular importance; second, include an account (sometimes implicit) of what makes the relevant separations problematic; and, third, propound some explanatory claims about the extent of, and prognosis for, alienation, so understood.

Marx’s ideas concerning alienation were greatly influenced by the critical writings on religion of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), and especially his The Essence of Christianity (1841). One key text in this respect is Marx’s “Contribution of Hegel’s Critique of Right: Introduction” (1843). This work is home to Marx’s notorious remark that religion is the “opium of the people,” a harmful, illusion-generating painkiller ( MECW 3: 175). It is here that Marx sets out his account of religion in most detail.

While traditional Christian theology asserts that God created man in God’s own image, Marx fully accepted Feuerbach’s inversion of this picture, proposing that human beings had invented God in their own image; indeed a view that long pre-dated Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s distinctive contribution was to argue that worshipping God diverted human beings from enjoying their own human powers. In their imagination humans raise their own powers to an infinite level and project them on to an abstract object. Hence religion is a form of alienation, for it separates human beings from their “species essence.” Marx accepted much of Feuerbach’s account but argues that Feuerbach failed to understand why people fall into religious alienation, and so is unable to explain how it can be transcended. Feuerbach’s view appears to be that belief in religion is purely an intellectual error and can be corrected by persuasion. Marx’s explanation is that religion is a response to alienation in material life, and therefore cannot be removed until human material life is emancipated, at which point religion will wither away.

Precisely what it is about material life that creates religion is not set out with complete clarity. However, it seems that at least two aspects of alienation are responsible. One is alienated labour, which will be explored shortly. A second is the need for human beings to assert their communal essence. Whether or not we explicitly recognise it, human beings exist as a community, and what makes human life possible is our mutual dependence on the vast network of social and economic relations which engulf us all, even though this is rarely acknowledged in our day-to-day life. Marx’s view appears to be that we must, somehow or other, acknowledge our communal existence in our institutions. At first it is “deviously acknowledged” by religion, which creates a false idea of a community in which we are all equal in the eyes of God. After the post-Reformation fragmentation of religion, where religion is no longer able to play the role even of a fake community of equals, the modern state fills this need by offering us the illusion of a community of citizens, all equal in the eyes of the law. Interestingly, the political or liberal state, which is needed to manage the politics of religious diversity, takes on the role offered by religion in earlier times of providing a form of illusory community. But the political state and religion will both be transcended when a genuine community of social and economic equals is created.

Although Marx was greatly inspired by thinking about religious alienation, much more of his attention was devoted to exploring alienation in work. In a much-discussed passage from the 1844 Manuscripts , Marx identifies four dimensions of alienated labour in contemporary capitalist society ( MECW 3: 270–282). First, immediate producers are separated from the product of their labour; they create a product that they neither own nor control, indeed, which comes to dominate them. (Note that this idea of “fetishism”—where human creations escape our control, achieve the appearance of independence, and come to oppress us—is not to be equated with alienation as such, but is rather one form that it can take.) Second, immediate producers are separated from their productive activity; in particular, they are forced to work in ways which are mentally and/or physically debilitating. Third, immediate producers are separated from other individuals; contemporary economic relations socialise individuals to view others as merely means to their own particular ends. Fourth, and finally, immediate producers are separated from their own human nature; for instance, the human capacities for community and for free, conscious, and creative, work, are both frustrated by contemporary capitalist relations.

Note that these claims about alienation are distinct from other, perhaps more familiar, complaints about work in capitalist society. For instance, alienated labour, as understood here, could be—even if it is often not—highly remunerated, limited in duration, and relatively secure.

Marx holds that work has the potential to be something creative and fulfilling. He consequently rejects the view of work as a necessary evil, denying that the negative character of work is part of our fate, a universal fact about the human condition that no amount of social change could remedy. Indeed, productive activity, on Marx’s account, is a central element in what it is to be a human being, and self-realisation through work is a vital component of human flourishing. That he thinks that work—in a different form of society—could be creative and fulfilling, perhaps explains the intensity and scale of Marx’s condemnation of contemporary economic arrangements and their transformation of workers into deformed and “dehumanised” beings ( MECW 3: 284).

It was suggested above that alienation consists of dysfunctional separations—separations between entities that properly belong together—and that theories of alienation typically presuppose some baseline condition whose frustration or violation by the relevant separation identifies the latter as dysfunctional. For Marx, that baseline seems to be provided by an account of human flourishing, which he conceptualises in terms of self-realisation (understood here as the development and deployment of our essential human capacities). Labour in capitalism, we can say, is alienated because it embodies separations preventing the self-realisation of producers; because it is organised in a way that frustrates the human need for free, conscious, and creative work.

So understood, and returning to the four separations said to characterise alienated labour, we can see that it is the implicit claim about human nature (the fourth separation) which identifies the other three separations as dysfunctional. If one subscribed to the same formal model of alienation and self-realisation, but held a different account of the substance of human nature, very different claims about work in capitalist society might result. Imagine a theorist who held that human beings were solitary, egoistic creatures, by nature. That theorist could accept that work in capitalist society encouraged isolation and selfishness, but deny that such results were alienating, because those results would not frustrate their baseline account of what it is to be a human being (indeed, they would rather facilitate those characteristics).

Marx seems to hold various views about the historical location and comparative extent of alienation. These include: that some systematic forms of alienation—presumably including religious alienation—existed in pre-capitalist societies; that systematic forms of alienation—including alienation in work—are only a feature of class divided societies; that systematic forms of alienation are greater in contemporary capitalist societies than in pre-capitalist societies; and that not all human societies are scarred by class division, in particular, that a future classless society (communism) will not contain systematic forms of alienation.

Marx maintains that alienation flows from capitalist social relations, and not from the kind of technological advances that capitalist society contains. His disapproval of capitalism is reserved for its social arrangements and not its material accomplishments. He had little time for what is sometimes called the “romantic critique of capitalism”, which sees industry and technology as the real villains, responsible for devastating the purportedly communitarian idyll of pre-capitalist relations. In contrast, Marx celebrates the bourgeoisie’s destruction of feudal relations, and sees technological growth and human liberation as (at least, in time) progressing hand-in-hand. Industry and technology are understood as part of the solution to, and not the source of, social problems.

There are many opportunities for scepticism here. In the present context, many struggle to see how the kind of large-scale industrial production that would presumably characterise communist society—communism purportedly being more productive than capitalism—would avoid alienation in work. Interesting responses to such concerns have been put forward, but they have typically come from commentators rather than from Marx himself (Kandiyali 2018). This is a point at which Marx’s self-denying ordinance concerning the detailed description of communist society prevents him from engaging directly with significant concerns about the direction of social change.

In the text “On The Jewish Question” (1843) Marx begins to make clear the distance between himself and his radical liberal colleagues among the Young Hegelians; in particular Bruno Bauer. Bauer had recently written against Jewish emancipation, from an atheist perspective, arguing that the religion of both Jews and Christians was a barrier to emancipation. In responding to Bauer, Marx makes one of the most enduring arguments from his early writings, by means of introducing a distinction between political emancipation—essentially the grant of liberal rights and liberties—and human emancipation. Marx’s reply to Bauer is that political emancipation is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of religion, as the contemporary example of the United States demonstrates. However, pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore, liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility—for Marx, the fact—that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of liberal rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation. Now we should be clear that Marx does not oppose political emancipation, for he sees that liberalism is a great improvement on the systems of feudalism and religious prejudice and discrimination which existed in the Germany of his day. Nevertheless, such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation. Unfortunately, Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it is clear that it is closely related to the ideas of non-alienated labour and meaningful community.

Even with these elaborations, many additional questions remain about Marx’s account. Three concerns are briefly addressed here.

First, one might worry about the place of alienation in the evolution of Marx’s thought. The once-popular suggestion that Marx only wrote about alienation in his early writings—his published and unpublished works from the early 1840s—is not sustained by the textual evidence. However, the theoretical role that the concept of alienation plays in his writings might still be said to evolve. For example, it has been suggested that alienation in the early writings is intended to play an “explanatory role”, whereas in his later work it comes to have a more “descriptive or diagnostic” function (Wood 1981 [2004: 7]).

A second concern is the role of human nature in the interpretation of alienation offered here. In one exegetical variant of this worry, the suggestion is that this account of alienation rests on a model of universal human nature which Marx’s (later) understanding of historical specificity and change prevents him from endorsing. However, there is much evidence against this purported later rejection of human nature (see Geras 1983). Indeed, the “mature” Marx explicitly affirms that human nature has both constant and mutable elements; that human beings are characterised by universal qualities, constant across history and culture, and variable qualities, reflecting historical and cultural diversity (McMurtry 1978: 19–53). One systematic, rather than exegetical, variant of the present worry suggests that we should not endorse accounts of alienation which depend on “thick” and inevitably controversial accounts of human nature (Jaeggi 2016). Whatever view we take of that claim about our endorsement, there seems little doubt about the “thickness” of Marx’s own account of human flourishing. To provide for the latter, a society must satisfy not only basic needs (for sustenance, warmth and shelter, certain climatic conditions, physical exercise, basic hygiene, procreation and sexual activity), but also less basic needs, both those that are not always appreciated to be part of his account (for recreation, culture, intellectual stimulation, artistic expression, emotional satisfaction, and aesthetic pleasure), and those that Marx is more often associated with (for fulfilling work and meaningful community) (Leopold 2007: 227–245).

Third, we may ask about Marx’s attitude towards the distinction sometimes made between subjective and objective alienation. These two forms of alienation can be exemplified separately or conjointly in the lives of particular individuals or societies (Hardimon 1994: 119–122). Alienation is “subjective” when it is characterised in terms of the presence (or absence) of certain beliefs or feelings; for example, when individuals are said to be alienated because they feel estranged from the world. Alienation is “objective” when it is characterised in terms which make no reference to the beliefs or feelings of individuals; for example, when individuals are said to be alienated because they fail to develop and deploy their essential human characteristics, whether or not they experience that lack of self-realisation as a loss. Marx seems to allow that these two forms of alienation are conceptually distinct, but assumes that in capitalist societies they are typically found together. Indeed, he often appears to think of subjective alienation as tracking the objective variant. That said, Marx does allow that they can come apart sociologically. At least, that is one way of reading a passage in The Holy Family where he recognises that capitalists do not get to engage in self-realising activities of the right kind (and hence are objectively alienated), but that—unlike the proletariat—they are content in their estrangement (and hence are lacking subjective alienation), feeling “at ease” in, and even “strengthened” by, it ( MECW 4: 36).

3. Theory of History

Marx did not set out his theory of history in great detail. Accordingly, it has to be constructed from a variety of texts, both those where he attempts to apply a theoretical analysis to past and future historical events, and those of a more purely theoretical nature. Of the latter, the “1859 Preface” to A Critique of Political Economy has achieved canonical status. However, the manuscripts collected together as The German Ideology , co-written with Engels in 1845-46, are also a much used early source. We shall briefly outline both texts, and then look at the reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history in the hands of his philosophically most influential recent exponent, G.A. Cohen (Cohen 1978 [2001], 1988), who builds on the interpretation of the early Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) (Plekhanov 1895 [1947]).

We should, however, be aware that Cohen’s interpretation is far from universally accepted. Cohen provided his reconstruction of Marx partly because he was frustrated with existing Hegelian-inspired “dialectical” interpretations of Marx, and what he considered to be the vagueness of the influential works of Louis Althusser (1918–1990), neither of which, he felt, provided a rigorous account of Marx’s views. However, some scholars believe that the interpretation that we shall focus on is faulty precisely for its insistence on a mechanical model and its lack of attention to the dialectic. One aspect of this criticism is that Cohen’s understanding has a surprisingly small role for the concept of class struggle, which is often felt to be central to Marx’s theory of history. Cohen’s explanation for this is that the “1859 Preface”, on which his interpretation is based, does not give a prominent role to class struggle, and indeed it is not explicitly mentioned. Yet this reasoning is problematic for it is possible that Marx did not want to write in a manner that would engage the concerns of the police censor, and, indeed, a reader aware of the context may be able to detect an implicit reference to class struggle through the inclusion of such phrases as “then begins an era of social revolution,” and “the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”. Hence it does not follow that Marx himself thought that the concept of class struggle was relatively unimportant. Furthermore, when A Critique of Political Economy was replaced by Capital , Marx made no attempt to keep the 1859 Preface in print, and its content is reproduced just as a very much abridged footnote in Capital . Nevertheless, we shall concentrate here on Cohen’s interpretation as no other account has been set out with comparable rigour, precision and detail.

In his “ Theses on Feuerbach ” (1845) Marx provides a background to what would become his theory of history by stating his objections to “all hitherto existing” materialism and idealism, understood as types of philosophical theories. Materialism is complimented for understanding the physical reality of the world, but is criticised for ignoring the active role of the human subject in creating the world we perceive. Idealism, at least as developed by Hegel, understands the active nature of the human subject, but confines it to thought or contemplation: the world is created through the categories we impose upon it. Marx combines the insights of both traditions to propose a view in which human beings do indeed create —or at least transform—the world they find themselves in, but this transformation happens not in thought but through actual material activity; not through the imposition of sublime concepts but through the sweat of their brow, with picks and shovels. This historical version of materialism, which, according to Marx, transcends and thus rejects all existing philosophical thought, is the foundation of Marx’s later theory of history. As Marx puts it in the “1844 Manuscripts”, “Industry is the actual historical relationship of nature … to man” ( MECW 3: 303). This thought, derived from reflection on the history of philosophy, together with his experience of social and economic realities, as a journalist, sets the agenda for all Marx’s future work.

In The German Ideology manuscripts, Marx and Engels contrast their new materialist method with the idealism that had characterised previous German thought. Accordingly, they take pains to set out the “premises of the materialist method”. They start, they say, from “real human beings”, emphasising that human beings are essentially productive, in that they must produce their means of subsistence in order to satisfy their material needs. The satisfaction of needs engenders new needs of both a material and social kind, and forms of society arise corresponding to the state of development of human productive forces. Material life determines, or at least “conditions” social life, and so the primary direction of social explanation is from material production to social forms, and thence to forms of consciousness. As the material means of production develop, “modes of co-operation” or economic structures rise and fall, and eventually communism will become a real possibility once the plight of the workers and their awareness of an alternative motivates them sufficiently to become revolutionaries.

In the sketch of The German Ideology , many of the key elements of historical materialism are present, even if the terminology is not yet that of Marx’s more mature writings. Marx’s statement in the “1859 Preface” renders something of the same view in sharper form. Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx’s view in the Preface begins from what Cohen calls the Development Thesis, which is pre-supposed, rather than explicitly stated in the Preface (Cohen 1978 [2001]: 134–174). This is the thesis that the productive forces tend to develop, in the sense of becoming more powerful, over time. The productive forces are the means of production, together with productively applicable knowledge: technology, in other words. The development thesis states not that the productive forces always do develop, but that there is a tendency for them to do so. The next thesis is the primacy thesis, which has two aspects. The first states that the nature of a society’s economic structure is explained by the level of development of its productive forces, and the second that the nature of the superstructure—the political and legal institutions of society—is explained by the nature of the economic structure. The nature of a society’s ideology, which is to say certain religious, artistic, moral and philosophical beliefs contained within society, is also explained in terms of its economic structure, although this receives less emphasis in Cohen’s interpretation. Indeed, many activities may well combine aspects of both the superstructure and ideology: a religion is constituted by both institutions and a set of beliefs.

Revolution and epoch change is understood as the consequence of an economic structure no longer being able to continue to develop the forces of production. At this point the development of the productive forces is said to be fettered, and, according to the theory, once an economic structure fetters development it will be revolutionised—“burst asunder” ( MECW 6: 489)—and eventually replaced with an economic structure better suited to preside over the continued development of the forces of production.

In outline, then, the theory has a pleasing simplicity and power. It seems plausible that human productive power develops over time, and plausible too that economic structures exist for as long as they develop the productive forces, but will be replaced when they are no longer capable of doing this. Yet severe problems emerge when we attempt to put more flesh on these bones.

Prior to Cohen’s work, historical materialism had not been regarded as a coherent view within English-language political philosophy. The antipathy is well summed up with the closing words of H.B. Acton’s The Illusion of the Epoch : “Marxism is a philosophical farrago” (1955: 271). One difficulty taken particularly seriously by Cohen is an alleged inconsistency between the explanatory primacy of the forces of production, and certain claims made elsewhere by Marx which appear to give the economic structure primacy in explaining the development of the productive forces. For example, in The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels state that: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production” ( MECW 6: 487). This appears to give causal and explanatory primacy to the economic structure—capitalism—which brings about the development of the forces of production. Cohen accepts that, on the surface at least, this generates a contradiction. Both the economic structure and the development of the productive forces seem to have explanatory priority over each other. Unsatisfied by such vague resolutions as “determination in the last instance”, or the idea of “dialectical” connections, Cohen self-consciously attempts to apply the standards of clarity and rigour of analytic philosophy to provide a reconstructed version of historical materialism.

The key theoretical innovation is to appeal to the notion of functional explanation, also sometimes called “consequence explanation” (Cohen 1978 [2001]: 249–296). The essential move is cheerfully to admit that the economic structure, such as capitalism, does indeed develop the productive forces, but to add that this, according to the theory, is precisely why we have capitalism (when we do). That is, if capitalism failed to develop the productive forces it would disappear. And, indeed, this fits beautifully with historical materialism. For Marx asserts that when an economic structure fails to develop the productive forces—when it “fetters” the productive forces—it will be revolutionised and the epoch will change. So the idea of “fettering” becomes the counterpart to the theory of functional explanation. Essentially fettering is what happens when the economic structure becomes dysfunctional.

Now it is apparent that this renders historical materialism consistent. Yet there is a question as to whether it is at too high a price. For we must ask whether functional explanation is a coherent methodological device. The problem is that we can ask what it is that makes it the case that an economic structure will only persist for as long as it develops the productive forces. Jon Elster has pressed this criticism against Cohen very hard (Elster 1985: 27–35). If we were to argue that there is an agent guiding history who has the purpose that the productive forces should be developed as much as possible then it would make sense that such an agent would intervene in history to carry out this purpose by selecting the economic structures which do the best job. However, it is clear that Marx makes no such metaphysical assumptions. Elster is very critical—sometimes of Marx, sometimes of Cohen—of the idea of appealing to “purposes” in history without those being the purposes of anyone.

Indeed Elster’s criticism was anticipated in fascinating terms by Simone Weil (1909–1943), who links Marx’s appeal to history’s purposes to the influence of Hegel on his thought:

We must remember the Hegelian origins of Marxist thought. Hegel believed in a hidden mind at work in the universe, and that the history of the world is simply the history of this world mind, which, as in the case of everything spiritual, tends indefinitely towards perfection. Marx claimed to “put back on its feet” the Hegelian dialectic, which he accused of being “upside down”, by substituting matter for mind as the motive power of history; but by an extraordinary paradox, he conceived history, starting from this rectification, as though he attributed to matter what is the very essence of mind—an unceasing aspiration towards the best. (Weil 1955 [1958: 43])

Cohen is well aware of the difficulty of appealing to purposes in history, but defends the use of functional explanation by comparing its use in historical materialism with its use in evolutionary biology. In contemporary biology it is commonplace to explain the existence of the stripes of a tiger, or the hollow bones of a bird, by pointing to the function of these features. Here we have apparent purposes which are not the purposes of anyone. The obvious counter, however, is that in evolutionary biology we can provide a causal story to underpin these functional explanations; a story involving chance variation and survival of the fittest. Therefore these functional explanations are sustained by a complex causal feedback loop in which dysfunctional elements tend to be filtered out in competition with better functioning elements. Cohen calls such background accounts “elaborations” and he concedes that functional explanations are in need of elaborations. But he points out that standard causal explanations are equally in need of elaborations. We might, for example, be satisfied with the explanation that the vase broke because it was dropped on the floor, but a great deal of further information is needed to explain why this explanation works.

Consequently, Cohen claims that we can be justified in offering a functional explanation even when we are in ignorance of its elaboration. Indeed, even in biology detailed causal elaborations of functional explanations have been available only relatively recently. Prior to Charles Darwin (1809–1882), or arguably Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), the only candidate causal elaboration was to appeal to God’s purposes. Darwin outlined a very plausible mechanism, but having no genetic theory was not able to elaborate it into a detailed account. Our knowledge remains incomplete in some respects to this day. Nevertheless, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that birds have hollow bones in order to facilitate flight. Cohen’s point is that the weight of evidence that organisms are adapted to their environment would permit even a pre-Darwinian atheist to assert this functional explanation with justification. Hence one can be justified in offering a functional explanation even in the absence of a candidate elaboration: if there is sufficient weight of inductive evidence.

At this point the issue, then, divides into a theoretical question and an empirical one. The empirical question is whether or not there is evidence that forms of society exist only for as long as they advance productive power, and are replaced by revolution when they fail. Here, one must admit, the empirical record is patchy at best, and there appear to have been long periods of stagnation, even regression, when dysfunctional economic structures were not revolutionised.

The theoretical issue is whether a plausible elaborating explanation is available to underpin Marxist functional explanations. Here there is something of a dilemma. In the first instance it is tempting to try to mimic the elaboration given in the Darwinian story, and appeal to chance variations and survival of the fittest. In this case “fittest” would mean “most able to preside over the development of the productive forces”. Chance variation would be a matter of people trying out new types of economic relations. On this account new economic structures begin through experiment, but thrive and persist through their success in developing the productive forces. However the problem is that such an account would seem to introduce a larger element of contingency than Marx seeks, for it is essential to Marx’s thought that one should be able to predict the eventual arrival of communism. Within Darwinian theory there is no warrant for long-term predictions, for everything depends on the contingencies of particular situations. A similar heavy element of contingency would be inherited by a form of historical materialism developed by analogy with evolutionary biology. The dilemma, then, is that the best model for developing the theory makes predictions based on the theory unsound, yet the whole point of the theory is predictive. Hence one must either look for an alternative means of producing elaborating explanation, or give up the predictive ambitions of the theory.

The driving force of history, in Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx, is the development of the productive forces, the most important of which is technology. But what is it that drives such development? Ultimately, in Cohen’s account, it is human rationality. Human beings have the ingenuity to apply themselves to develop means to address the scarcity they find. This on the face of it seems very reasonable. Yet there are difficulties. As Cohen himself acknowledges, societies do not always do what would be rational for an individual to do. Co-ordination problems may stand in our way, and there may be structural barriers. Furthermore, it is relatively rare for those who introduce new technologies to be motivated by the need to address scarcity. Rather, under capitalism, the profit motive is the key. Of course it might be argued that this is the social form that the material need to address scarcity takes under capitalism. But still one may raise the question whether the need to address scarcity always has the influence that it appears to have taken on in modern times. For example, a ruling class’s absolute determination to hold on to power may have led to economically stagnant societies. Alternatively, it might be thought that a society may put religion or the protection of traditional ways of life ahead of economic needs. This goes to the heart of Marx’s theory that man is an essentially productive being and that the locus of interaction with the world is industry. As Cohen himself later argued in essays such as “Reconsidering Historical Materialism” (1988), the emphasis on production may appear one-sided, and ignore other powerful elements in human nature. Such a criticism chimes with a criticism from the previous section; that the historical record may not, in fact, display the tendency to growth in the productive forces assumed by the theory.

Many defenders of Marx will argue that the problems stated are problems for Cohen’s interpretation of Marx, rather than for Marx himself. It is possible to argue, for example, that Marx did not have a general theory of history, but rather was a social scientist observing and encouraging the transformation of capitalism into communism as a singular event. And it is certainly true that when Marx analyses a particular historical episode, as he does in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), any idea of fitting events into a fixed pattern of history seems very far from Marx’s mind. On other views Marx did have a general theory of history but it is far more flexible and less determinate than Cohen insists (Miller 1984). And finally, as noted, there are critics who believe that Cohen’s interpretation is entirely wrong-headed owing to its dismissive attitude to dialectical reasoning (Sayers 1984 [1990]).

4. Economics

How to read Marx’s economic writings, and especially his masterpiece Capital Volume 1, remains a matter of controversy. An orthodox reading is that Marx’s essential task is to contribute to economic theory, based on a modified form of the labour theory of value. Others warn against such a narrow interpretation, pointing out that the character of Marx’s writing and presentation is very far from what one would expect in a standard economic text. Hence William Clare Roberts (2017), for example, argues that Capital Volume 1 is fundamentally a work of political theory, rather than economics. Be that as it may, nevertheless, the work does contain substantial presentation of an economic analysis of capitalism, and it is on this that we will focus here.

Capital Volume 1 begins with an analysis of the idea of commodity production. A commodity is defined as a useful external object, produced for exchange on a market. Thus, two necessary conditions for commodity production are: the existence of a market, in which exchange can take place; and a social division of labour, in which different people produce different products, without which there would be no motivation for exchange. Marx suggests that commodities have both use-value—a use, in other words—and an exchange-value—initially to be understood as their price. Use value can easily be understood, so Marx says, but he insists that exchange value is a puzzling phenomenon, and relative exchange values need to be explained. Why does a quantity of one commodity exchange for a given quantity of another commodity? His explanation is in terms of the labour input required to produce the commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour, which is labour exerted at the average level of intensity and productivity for that branch of activity within the economy. Thus the labour theory of value asserts that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time required to produce it.

Marx provides a two-stage argument for the labour theory of value. The first stage is to argue that if two objects can be compared in the sense of being put on either side of an equals sign, then there must be a “third thing of identical magnitude in both of them” to which they are both reducible. As commodities can be exchanged against each other, there must, Marx argues, be a third thing that they have in common. This then motivates the second stage, which is a search for the appropriate “third thing”, which is labour in Marx’s view, as the only plausible common element. Both steps of the argument are, of course, highly contestable.

Capitalism can be distinguished from other forms of commodity exchange, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit. Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to explain how capitalism as a whole can make a profit. Marx’s own solution relies on the idea of exploitation of the worker. In setting up conditions of production the capitalist purchases the worker’s labour power—his or her ability to labour—for the day. The cost of this commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other; that is, in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour power required to produce it. In this case the value of a day’s labour power is the value of the commodities necessary to keep the worker alive for a day. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Accordingly the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. In Marx’s analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.

It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry becomes more mechanised, using more constant capital and less variable capital, the rate of profit ought to fall. For as a proportion less capital will be advanced on labour, and only labour can create value. In Capital Volume 3 Marx does indeed make the prediction that the rate of profit will fall over time, and this is one of the factors which leads to the downfall of capitalism. (However, as pointed out by Paul Sweezy in The Theory of Capitalist Development (1942), the analysis is problematic.) A further consequence of this analysis is a difficulty for the theory that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to meet also in the manuscripts that make up Capital Volume 3. It follows from the analysis so far that labour-intensive industries ought to have a higher rate of profit than those which use less labour. Not only is this empirically false, it is theoretically unacceptable. Accordingly, Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way from values. Providing the mathematics to explain this is known as the transformation problem, and Marx’s own attempt suffers from technical difficulties. Although there are sophisticated known techniques for solving this problem now there is a question about the degree to which they do rescue Marx’s project. If it is thought that the labour theory of value was initially motivated as an intuitively plausible theory of price then when the connection between price and value is rendered as indirect as it is in the final theory, the intuitive motivation of the theory drains away. Others consider this to be a superficial reading of Marx, and that his general approach allows us to see through the appearances of capitalism to understand its underlying basis, which need not coincide with appearances. How Marx’s theory of capitalism should be read remains an active area of scholarly debate (Heinrich 2012).

A further objection is that Marx’s assertion that only labour can create surplus value is unsupported by any argument or analysis, and can be argued to be merely an artefact of the nature of his presentation. Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role. Consequently, with equal justification one could set out a corn theory of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more value than it costs. Formally this would be identical to the labour theory of value (Roemer 1982). Nevertheless, the claims that somehow labour is responsible for the creation of value, and that profit is the consequence of exploitation, remain intuitively powerful, even if they are difficult to establish in detail.

However, even if the labour theory of value is considered discredited, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth. The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian Economics (1942), picked out two aspects of particular note. First, Marx’s refusal to accept that capitalism involves a harmony of interests between worker and capitalist, replacing this with a class-based analysis of the worker’s struggle for better wages and conditions of work, versus the capitalist’s drive for ever greater profits. Second, Marx’s denial that there is any long-run tendency to equilibrium in the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which underlie the trade-cycle of boom and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory.

As noted, traditionally Marx’s definition of exploitation is given in terms of the theory of surplus value, which in turn is taken to depend on the labour theory of value: the theory that the value of any commodity is proportional to the amount of “socially necessary” labour embodied in it. However, the question arises of whether the basic idea of exploitation should be so dependent on a particular theory of value. For if it is, the notion of exploitation becomes vulnerable to Robert Nozick’s objection: that if the labour theory of value can be shown to be faulty, the Marxist theory of exploitation collapses too (Nozick 1974).

Others have felt that it is possible to restore the intuitive core of a Marxist theory of exploitation independent of the labour theory of value (cf. Cohen 1979, Wolff 1999, Vrousalis 2013). John Roemer, to take one leading case, states:

Marxian exploitation is defined as the unequal exchange of labor for goods: the exchange is unequal when the amount of labor embodied in the goods which the worker can purchase with his income … is less than the amount of labor he expended to earn that income.(Roemer 1985: 30)

Suppose I work eight hours to earn my wages. With this perhaps the best thing I can buy is a coat. But imagine that the coat took only a total of four hours to make. Therefore I have exchanged my eight hours work for only four hours of other people’s work, and thereby, on this view, I am exploited.

The definition requires some refinement. For example, if I am taxed for the benefit of those unable to work, I will be exploited by the above definition, but this is not what the definition of exploitation was intended to capture. Worse still, if there is one person exploited much more gravely than anyone else in the economy, then it may turn out that no-one else is exploited. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult to adjust the definition to take account of these difficulties, and as noted several other accounts of Marx-inspired accounts of exploitation have been offered that are independent of the labour theory of value.

Many of these alternative definitions add a notion of unfreedom or domination to unequal exchange of labour and goods (Vrousalis 2013). The exploited person is forced to accept a situation in which he or she just never gets back what they put into the labour process. Now there may be, in particular cases, a great deal to be said about why this is perfectly acceptable from a moral point of view. However, on the face of it such exploitation appears to be unjust. Nevertheless, we will see in the next section why attributing such a position to Marx himself is fraught with difficulty.

5. Morality

The issue of Marx and morality poses a conundrum. On reading Marx’s works at all periods of his life, there appears to be the strongest possible distaste towards bourgeois capitalist society, and an undoubted endorsement of future communist society. Yet the terms of this antipathy and endorsement are far from clear. Despite expectations, Marx never directly says that capitalism is unjust. Neither does he directly say that communism would be a just form of society. In fact he frequently takes pains to distance himself from those who engage in a discourse of justice, and makes a conscious attempt to exclude direct moral commentary in his own works. The puzzle is why this should be, given the weight of indirect moral commentary one also finds in his writings.

There are, initially, separate questions concerning Marx’s attitude to capitalism and to communism. There are also separate questions concerning his attitude to ideas of justice, and to ideas of morality more broadly concerned. This, then, generates four questions: (a) Did Marx think capitalism unjust?; (b) did he think that capitalism could be morally criticised on other grounds?; (c) did he think that communism would be just? (d) did he think it could be morally approved of on other grounds? These are some of the questions we consider in this section.

The initial argument that Marx must have thought that capitalism is unjust is based on the observation that Marx argued that all capitalist profit is ultimately derived from the exploitation of the worker. Capitalism’s dirty secret is that it is not a realm of harmony and mutual benefit but a system in which one class systematically extracts profit from another. How could this fail to be unjust? Yet it is notable that Marx never explicitly draws such a conclusion, and in Capital he goes as far as to say that such exchange is “by no means an injury to the seller” (MECW 35: 204), which some commentators have taken as evidence that Marx did not think that capitalism was unjust, although other readings are possible.

Allen Wood (1972) is perhaps the leading advocate of the view that Marx did not believe that capitalism is unjust. Wood argues that Marx takes this approach because his general theoretical approach excludes any trans-epochal standpoint from which one can comment on the justice of an economic system. Even though it is acceptable to criticise particular behaviour from within an economic structure as unjust (and theft under capitalism would be an example) it is not possible to criticise capitalism as a whole. This is a consequence of Marx’s analysis of the role of ideas of justice from within historical materialism. Marx claims that juridical institutions are part of the superstructure, and that ideas of justice are ideological. Accordingly, the role of both the superstructure and ideology, in the functionalist reading of historical materialism adopted here, is to stabilise the economic structure. Consequently, to state that something is just under capitalism is simply a judgement that it will tend to have the effect of advancing capitalism. According to Marx, in any society the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class; the core of the theory of ideology.

Ziyad Husami (1978) however, argues that Wood is mistaken, ignoring the fact that for Marx ideas undergo a double determination. We need to differentiate not just by economic system, but also by economic class within the system. Therefore the ideas of the non-ruling class may be very different from those of the ruling class. Of course, it is the ideas of the ruling class that receive attention and implementation, but this does not mean that other ideas do not exist. Husami goes as far as to argue that members of the proletariat under capitalism have an account of justice that matches communism. From this privileged standpoint of the proletariat, which is also Marx’s standpoint, capitalism is unjust, and so it follows that Marx thought capitalism unjust.

Plausible though it may sound, Husami’s argument fails to account for two related points. First, it cannot explain why Marx never explicitly described capitalism as unjust, and second, it overlooks the distance Marx wanted to place between his own scientific socialism, and that of other socialists who argued for the injustice of capitalism. Hence one cannot avoid the conclusion that the “official” view of Marx is that capitalism is not unjust.

Nevertheless, this leaves us with a puzzle. Much of Marx’s description of capitalism—his use of the words “embezzlement”, “robbery” and “exploitation”—belie the official account. Arguably, the only satisfactory way of understanding this issue is, once more, from G.A. Cohen, who proposes that Marx believed that capitalism was unjust, but did not believe that he believed it was unjust (Cohen 1983). In other words, Marx, like so many of us, did not have perfect knowledge of his own mind. In his explicit reflections on the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view. But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never in explicit language. Such an interpretation is bound to be controversial, but it makes good sense of the texts.

Whatever one concludes on the question of whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, it is, nevertheless, obvious that Marx thought that capitalism was not the best way for human beings to live. Points made in his early writings remain present throughout his writings, if no longer connected to an explicit theory of alienation. The worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty, overwork and lack of fulfilment and freedom. People do not relate to each other as humans should. Does this amount to a moral criticism of capitalism or not? In the absence of any special reason to argue otherwise, it simply seems obvious that Marx’s critique is a moral one. Capitalism impedes human flourishing. It is hard to disagree with the judgement that Marx

thinks that the capitalist exploitation of labor power is a wrong that has horrendous consequences for the laborers. (Roberts 2017: 129)

Marx, though, once more refrained from making this explicit; he seemed to show no interest in locating his criticism of capitalism in any of the traditions of moral philosophy, or explaining how he was generating a new tradition. There may have been two reasons for his caution. The first was that while there were bad things about capitalism, there is, from a world historical point of view, much good about it too. For without capitalism, communism would not be possible. Capitalism is to be transcended, not abolished, and this may be difficult to convey in the terms of moral philosophy.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, we need to return to the contrast between Marxian and other forms of socialism. Many non-Marxian socialists appealed to universal ideas of truth and justice to defend their proposed schemes, and their theory of transition was based on the idea that appealing to moral sensibilities would be the best, perhaps only, way of bringing about the new chosen society. Marx wanted to distance himself from these other socialist traditions, and a key point of distinction was to argue that the route to understanding the possibilities of human emancipation lay in the analysis of historical and social forces, not in morality. Hence, for Marx, any appeal to morality was theoretically a backward step.

This leads us now to Marx’s assessment of communism. Would communism be a just society? In considering Marx’s attitude to communism and justice there are really only two viable possibilities: either he thought that communism would be a just society or he thought that the concept of justice would not apply: that communism would transcend justice.

Communism is described by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme , as a society in which each person should contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need. This certainly sounds like a theory of justice, and could be adopted as such (Gilabert 2015). However, many will hold that it is truer to Marx’s thought to say that this is part of an account in which communism transcends justice, as Lukes has argued (Lukes 1987).

If we start with the idea that the point of ideas of justice is to resolve disputes, then a society without disputes would have no need or place for justice. We can see this by reflecting upon the idea of the circumstances of justice in the work of David Hume (1711–1776). Hume argued that if there was enormous material abundance—if everyone could have whatever they wanted without invading another’s share—we would never have devised rules of justice. And, of course, there are suggestions in Marx’s writings that communism would be a society of such abundance. But Hume also suggested that justice would not be needed in other circumstances; if there were complete fellow-feeling between all human beings, there would be no conflict and no need for justice. Of course, one can argue whether either material abundance or human fellow-feeling to this degree would be possible, but the point is that both arguments give a clear sense in which communism transcends justice.

Nevertheless, we remain with the question of whether Marx thought that communism could be commended on other moral grounds. On a broad understanding, in which morality, or perhaps better to say ethics, is concerned with the idea of living well, it seems that communism can be assessed favourably in this light. One compelling argument is that Marx’s career simply makes no sense unless we can attribute such a belief to him. But beyond this we can be brief in that the considerations adduced in Section 2 above apply again. Communism clearly advances human flourishing, in Marx’s view. The only reason for denying that, in Marx’s vision, it would amount to a good society is a theoretical antipathy to the word “good”. And here the main point is that, in Marx’s view, communism would not be brought about by high-minded benefactors of humanity. Quite possibly his determination to retain this point of difference between himself and other socialists led him to disparage the importance of morality to a degree that goes beyond the call of theoretical necessity.

6. Ideology

The account of ideology contained in Marx’s writings is regularly portrayed as a crucial element of his intellectual legacy. It has been identified as among his “most influential” ideas (Elster 1986: 168), and acclaimed as “the most fertile” part of his social and political theory (Leiter 2004: 84). Not least, these views on ideology are said to constitute Marx’s claim to a place—alongside Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)—as one of the “masters of suspicion”; that is, as an author whose work casts doubt on the transparency of our everyday understandings of both our own identity and the social world we inhabit (Ricouer 1970: 32–33).

Given this enthusiastic reception, it can come as something of a surprise to turn to Marx’s writings and discover how little they contain about ideology, and how inchoate and opaque those infrequent and passing observations on that topic are. There are, of course, some famous quotations, not least from The German Ideology manuscripts. The references there to ideology as involving an “inversion” of the relation between individuals and their circumstances, perhaps analogous to the workings of a “camera obscura”—an optical device which projected an image of its surroundings, upside down but preserving perspective, onto a screen inside—have often mesmerised commentators but not always generated much genuine illumination ( MECW 5: 36). The point should not be exaggerated, but these striking images notwithstanding, there is no clear and sustained discussion of ideology in the Marxian corpus.

Many commentators maintain that the search for a single model of ideology in his work has to be given up. Indeed, there is something of an “arms race” in the literature, as commentators discover two, three, even five, competing models of ideology in Marx’s writings (Mepham 1979; Wood 1981 [2004]; Rosen 1996). Most surprisingly, it seems that some licence can be found in Marx’s corpus for three very different ways of thinking about what ideology is. There is textual evidence of his variously utilising: a “descriptive” account of ideology involving a broadly anthropological study of the beliefs and rituals characteristic of certain groups; a “positive” account of ideology as a “worldview” providing the members of a group with a sense of meaning and identity; and a “critical” account seeking to liberate individuals from certain false and misleading forms of understanding (Geuss 1981: 4–26).

It is the last of these—the critical account rather than either of the two “non-critical” accounts—which is central to his wider social and political theory, but this account is itself subject to some considerable interpretative disagreement. Marx’s theory of ideology is usually portrayed as an element in what might be called Marx’s sociology, as distinct from his philosophical anthropology say, or his theory of history (although complexly related to the latter).

Marx does not view ideology as a feature of all societies, and, in particular, suggests that it will not be a feature of a future communist society. However, ideology is portrayed as a feature of all class-divided societies, and not only of capitalist society—although many of Marx’s comments on ideology are concerned with the latter. The theory of ideology appears to play a role in explaining a feature of class-divided societies which might otherwise appear puzzling, namely what might be called their “stability”; that is, the absence of overt and serious conflict between social classes. This stability is not permanent, but it can last for extended historical periods. This stability appears puzzling to Marx because class-divided societies are flawed in ways which not only frustrate human flourishing, but also work to the material advantage of the ruling minority. Why do the subordinate classes, who form a majority, tolerate these flaws, when resistance and rebellion of various kinds might be in their objective interests?

Marx’s account of the sources of social stability in class-divided societies appeals to both repressive and non-repressive mechanisms. Such societies might often involve the direct repression (or the threat of it) of one group by another, but Marx does not think that this is the whole story. There are also non-repressive sources of social stability, and ideology is usually, and plausibly, considered one of these. Very roughly, Marx’s account of ideology claims that the dominant social ideas in such societies are typically false or misleading in a fashion that works to the advantage of the economically dominant class.

We should note that ideology would seem to be a part and not the whole of Marx’s account of the non-repressive sources of stability in class divided societies. Other factors might include: dull economic pressure, including the daily grind of having to earn a living; doubts—justified or otherwise—about the feasibility of alternatives; sensitivity to the possible costs of radical social change; and collective action problems of various kinds which face those who do want to rebel and resist. Marx does not think individuals are permanently trapped within ideological modes of thinking. Ideology may have an initial hold, but it is not portrayed as impervious to reason and evidence, especially in circumstances in which the objective conditions for social change obtain.

For Marx ideological beliefs are social in that they are widely shared, indeed so widely-shared that for long periods they constitute the “ruling” or “dominant” ideas in a given class-divided society ( MECW 5: 59). And they are social in that they directly concern, or indirectly impact upon, the action-guiding understandings of self and society that individuals have. These action-guiding understandings include the dominant legal, political, religious, and philosophical views within particular class-divided societies in periods of stability (MECW 29: 263).

Not all false or misleading beliefs count for Marx as ideological. Honest scientific error, for example can be non-ideological. And ideological belief can be misleading without being strictly false. For example, defenders of the capitalist economy portray what Marx calls the “wage form”, with its exchange of equivalents, as the whole (rather than a part) of the story about the relation between capital and labour, thereby ignoring the exploitation which occurs in the sphere of production. Indeed, the notion of the “falsity” of ideology needs to be expanded beyond the content of the “ideas” in question, to include cases where their origins are in some way contaminated (Geuss 1981: 19–22). Perhaps the only reason I believe something to be the case is that the belief in question has a consoling effect on me. Arguably such a belief is held ideologically, even if it happens to be true. Nevertheless paradigmatic examples of ideology have a false content. For example, ideology often portrays institutions, policies, and decisions which are in the interests of the economically dominant class, as being in the interests of the society as a whole ( MECW 5: 60); and ideology often portrays social and political arrangements which are contingent, or historical, or artificial, as being necessary, or universal, or natural ( MECW 35: 605).

In addition to false or misleading content, ideological beliefs typically have at least two additional characteristics, relating to their social origin and their class function. By the “social origin” of ideology is meant that Marx thinks of these ideas as often originating with, and being reinforced by, the complex structure of class-divided societies—a complex structure in which a deceptive surface appearance is governed by underlying essential relations (Geras 1986: 63–84). Capitalism is seen as especially deceptive in appearance; for example, Marx often contrasts the relative transparency of “exploitation” under feudalism, with the way in which the “wage form” obscures the ratio of necessary and surplus labour in capitalist societies. Ideology stems, in part, from this deceptive surface appearance which makes it difficult to grasp the underlying social flaws that benefit the economically dominant class. Marx portrays the striving to uncover essences concealed by misleading appearances as characteristic of scientific endeavour ( MECW 37, 804). And, in this context, he distinguishes between classical political economy, which strove—albeit not always successfully—to uncover the essential relations often concealed behind misleading appearances, and what he calls vulgar economy, which happily restricts itself to the misleading appearances themselves ( MECW 37, 804).

By the “class function” of ideology is meant that Marx holds that the pervasiveness of ideology is explained by the fact it helps stabilise the economic structure of societies. All sorts of ideas might get generated for all sorts of reasons, but the ones that tend to “stick” (become widely accepted) in class-divided societies do so, not because of their truth, but because they conceal or misrepresent or justify flaws in that society in ways which redound to the benefit of the economically dominant class (Rosen & Wolff 1996: 235–236).

In response critics often see this as just another example of sloppy functional reasoning—purportedly widespread in the Marxist tradition—whereby a general pattern is asserted without the identification of any of the mechanisms which might generate that pattern. In the present case, it is said that Marx never properly explains why the ruling ideas should be those of the ruling class (Elster 1985: 473). Yet there are obvious possible mechanisms here. To give two examples. First, there is the control of the ruling class over the means of mental production, and in particular the print and broadcast media which in capitalist societies are typically owned and controlled by the very wealthy ( MECW 5, 59). A second possible mechanism appeals to the psychological need of individuals for invented narratives that legitimise or justify their social position; for instance, Marx identifies a widespread need, in flawed societies, for the consolatory effects of religion ( MECW 3, 175).

7. State and Politics

This broad heading—the state and politics—could cover very many different issues. To make the present account manageable, only two are addressed here: Marx’s account of the state in capitalist society; and Marx’s account of the fate of the state in communist society. (Consequently, many other important political issues—the nature of pre-capitalist states, relations between states, the political transition to communism, and so on—are not dealt with.)

Marx offers no unified theoretical account of the state in capitalist society. Instead his remarks on this topic are scattered across the course of his activist life, and deeply embedded in discussions of contemporary events, events which most modern readers will know very little about. Providing some initial order to that complexity, Jon Elster helpfully identifies three different models in Marx’s writings of the relationship, in capitalist society, between the political state, on the one hand, and the economically dominant class, on the other. (The next three paragraphs draw heavily on Elster 1985: 409–437.)

First, the “instrumental” model portrays the state as simply a tool, directly controlled by the economically dominant class, in its own interests, at the expense of the interests both of other classes and of the community as a whole. Marx is usually said to endorse the instrumental account in the Communist Manifesto , where he and Engels insist that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” ( MECW 6: 486). On this account, the state might also act against the short term, or the factional, interests of particular capitalists. The picture here is of the state as an instrument directed—presumably by a subset of capitalists or their representatives—in ways which promote the long term interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. The precise mechanisms which might facilitate that result are not clear in Marx’s writings.

Second, the “class balance” model portrays the state as having interests of its own, with capitalist interests as merely one of the strategic limits on its pursuit of these. This model gets its name from the exceptional social circumstances said to explain the independence of the state in this case. In situations where the social power of the two warring classes of contemporary society—capitalists and workers—are very nearly balanced, the political state (and especially the executive) can gain independence from both, exploiting that conflict in order to promote its own interests (the interests of the political caste). Something like this picture appears in Marx’s discussions of the continued existence of certain absolutist states after the revolutions of 1848, and of the Bonapartist state established in France by the coup of Napoleon III in December 1851. The state now competes with capitalists and proletarians (and is not merely the tool of the former), and by “promising each of the major classes to protect it against the other, the government can rule autonomously” (Elster 1985: 425). On this account, the state has interests of its own, but presumably only gets to pursue them if those promises to others are plausible, finding some reflection in its policies and behaviour. Capitalist interests accordingly remain a political constraint, but they are now only one of the factors constraining the state’s actions rather than constituting its primary goal.

Third, the “abdication” model presents the bourgeoisie as staying away from the direct exercise of political power, but doing this because it is in their economic interests to do so. As Elster notes, strictly speaking, “abdication” here covers two slightly different cases—first, where the bourgeoisie abdicate from the political power that they initially controlled (relevant to France); and, second, where the bourgeoisie abstain from taking political power in the first place (relevant to Britain and Germany)—but they can be treated together. In both cases, Marx identifies a situation where “in order to save its purse, [the bourgeoisie] must forfeit the crown” ( MECW 11: 143). Where the instrumental picture claims that the state acts in the interests of the capitalist class because it is directly controlled by the latter, the abdication picture advances an explanatory connection between the promotion of bourgeois interests and the retreat from the direct exercise of power. Circumstances obtain where “the political rule of the bourgeoisie” turns out to be “incompatible” with its continued economic flourishing, and the bourgeoisie seeks “to get rid of its own political rule in order to get rid of the troubles and dangers of ruling” ( MECW 11: 173). There are several possible explanations of why the bourgeoisie might remain outside of politics in order to promote their own interests. To give three examples: the bourgeoisie might recognise that their own characteristic short-termism could be fatal to their own interests if they exercised direct political as well as economic power; the bourgeoisie might find political rule sufficiently time and effort consuming to withdraw from it, discovering that the economic benefits kept on coming regardless; or the bourgeoisie might appreciate that abdication weakened their class opponents, forcing the proletariat to fight on two fronts (against capital and government) and thereby making it less able to win those struggles.

There are many questions one might have about these three models.

First, one might wonder which of these three models best embodies Marx’s considered view? The instrumental account is the earliest account, which he largely abandons from the early 1850s, presumably noticing how poorly it captured contemporary political realities—in particular, the stable existence of states which were not directly run by the capitalist class, but which still in some way served their interests. That outcome is possible under either of the two other accounts. However, Marx seems to have thought of the class balance model as a temporary solution in exceptional circumstances, and perhaps held that it failed to allow the stable explanatory connection that he sought between the extant political arrangements and the promotion of dominant economic interests. In short, for better or worse, Marx’s considered view looks closer to the abdication account, reflecting his conviction that the central features of political life are explained by the existing economic structure.

Second, one might wonder which model allows greatest “autonomy” to the political state? A weak definition of state autonomy might portray the state as autonomous when it is independent of direct control by the economically dominant class. On this definition, both the class balance and abdication models—but not the instrumental account—seem to provide for autonomy. A stronger definition of state autonomy might require what Elster calls “explanatory autonomy”, which exists

when (and to the extent that) its structure and policies cannot be explained by the interest of an economically dominant class. (Elster 1985: 405)

Only the class balance view seems to allow significant explanatory autonomy. In his preferred abdication account, Marx allows that the state in capitalist society is independent of direct capitalist control, but goes on to claim that its main structures (including that very independence) and policies are ultimately explained by the interests of the capitalist class.

For reasons discussed below (see Section 8 ), Marx declines to say much about the basic structure of a future communist society. However, in the case of the fate of the state, that reluctance is partially mitigated by his view that the institutional arrangements of the Paris Commune prefigured the political dimensions of communist society.

Marx’s views on the nature and fate of the state in communist society are to be distinguished from his infrequent, and subsequently notorious, use of the term “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. (On the infrequency, context, and content, of these uses see Draper 1986 and Hunt 1974.) The idea of “dictatorship” in this historical context has the (ancient) connotation of emergency rule rather than the (modern) connotation of totalitarianism. Marx’s use makes it clear that any such temporary government should be democratic; for instance, in having majority support, and in preserving democratic rights (of speech, association, and so on). However, it is by definition “extra-legal” in that it seeks to establish a new regime and not to preserve an old one. So understood, the dictatorship of the proletariat forms part of the political transition to communist society (a topic not covered here), rather than part of the institutional structure of communist society itself. The “dictatorial”—that is, the temporary and extra-legal—character of this regime ends with establishment of a new and stable polity, and it is the latter which is discussed here (Hunt 1974: 297).

The character of the state in communist society consists, in part, of its form (its institutional arrangements) and its function (the tasks that it undertakes).

Some sense of the form of the state in communist society can be gained from Marx’s engagement with the Paris Commune. His preferred future political arrangements involve a high degree of participation, and the radical “de-professionalisation” of certain public offices. First, Marx is enthusiastic about regular elections, universal suffrage, mandat impératif , recall, open executive proceedings, decentralisation, and so on. Second, he objects to public offices (in the legislature, executive, and judiciary) being the spoils of a political caste, and sought to make them working positions, remunerated at the average worker’s wage, and regularly circulating (through election). This combination of arrangements has been characterised as “democracy without professionals” (Hunt 1974: 365). Marx saw it as reflecting his view that:

Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it. ( MECW 24: 94)

Some sense of the function of the state in communist society can be gained from Marx’s distinction between “necessary” tasks that a state would need to undertake in all societies (at least, economically developed societies), and “unnecessary” tasks that a state would only need to undertake in class-divided societies. The difficulty here is less in allowing this distinction, than in deciding what might fall into each category. On the necessary side, Marx appears to require that the state in communist society provide both: democratic solutions to coordination problems (deciding which side of the road traffic should drive on, for instance); and the supply of public goods (health, welfare, education, and so on). On the unnecessary side, Marx seems to think that a communist society might hugely reduce, or even eliminate, the element of organised coercion found in most states (in the form of standing armies, police forces, and so on). At least, this reduction might be feasible once communist society had reached its higher stage (where distribution is based on “the needs principle”), and there is no longer a threat from non-communist societies.

Again, there are many reservations that one might have about this account.

First, many will be sceptical about its feasibility, and perhaps especially of the purported reduction, still less elimination, of state coercion. That scepticism might be motivated by the thought that this would only be possible if communist society were characterised by widespread social and political consensus, and that such consensus is, both unlikely (at least, in modern societies), and undesirable (diversity and disagreement having a value). However, the reduction, or even elimination, of state coercion might be compatible with certain forms of continuing disagreement about the ends and means of communist society. Imagine that a democratic communist polity introduces a new law prohibiting smoking in public places, and that a representative smoker (call her Anne) obeys that law despite being among the minority who wanted this practice permitted. Anne’s motivation for obedience, we can stipulate, is grounded, not in fear of the likely response of bodies of armed persons enforcing the law, but rather in respect for the democratic majority of the community of which she is a part. In short, reasonably strong assumptions about the democratic commitments of individuals might allow the scaling down of organised coercion without having to presume universal agreement amongst citizens on all issues.

Second, some might object to the reference, throughout this section, to the “state” in communist society. It might be said that a polity whose form and functions are so radically transformed—the form by democratic participation and de-professionalisation, the function by eliminating historically unnecessary tasks—is insufficiently “state-like” to be called a state. That is certainly possible, but the terminological claim would appear to assume that there is greater clarity and agreement about just what a state is, either than is presupposed here or than exists in the world. Given that lack of consensus, “state” seems a suitably prudent choice. As well as being consistent with some of Marx’s usage, it avoids prejudging this very issue. However, anyone unmoved by those considerations can simply replace “state”, in this context, with their own preferred alternative.

8. Utopianism

It is well-known that Marx never provided a detailed account of the basic structure of the future communist society that he predicted. This was not simply an omission on his part, but rather reflects his deliberate commitment, as he colloquially has it, to refrain from writing “recipes” for the “restaurants” of the future ( MECW 35: 17, translation amended).

The reasoning that underpins this commitment can be reconstructed from Marx’s engagement with the radical political tradition that he called “utopian socialism”, and whose founding triumvirate were Charles Fourier (1772–1837), Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825), and Robert Owen (1771–1858). Note that the distinction between Marxian socialism and utopian socialism is not an exhaustive one. Marx happily allows that there are socialists who are neither Marxian nor Utopian; for example, the “feudal socialists” discussed in the Communist Manifesto .

What distinguishes utopian from other socialists is, in large part, their view that providing persuasive constructive plans and blueprints of future socialist arrangements is a legitimate and necessary activity. (The expression “plans and blueprints” is used here to capture the necessary detail of these descriptions, and not to suggest that these designs have to be thought of as “stipulative”, as having to be followed to the letter.) On the utopian account, the socialist future needs to be designed before it can be delivered; the plans and blueprints being intended to guide and motivate socialists in their transformative ambitions. Of course, that Marx is not in this sense utopian does not rule out the possibility of additional (here unspecified) senses in which he might accurately be so described.

Marx’s account of utopian socialism might appear contradictory. It is certainly easy to find not only passages fiercely criticising utopian authors and texts, but also passages generously praising them. However, that criticism and that praise turn out to attach to slightly different targets, revealing an underlying and consistent structure to his account.

That underlying structure rests on two main distinctions. The first distinction is a chronological one running between the founding triumvirate, on the one hand, and second and subsequent generations of utopian socialists, on the other. (These later generations including both loyal followers of the founding triumvirate, and independent later figures such as Étienne Cabet (1788–1856)). The second distinction is a substantive one running between the critical part of utopian writings (the portrayal of faults within contemporary capitalist society), on the one hand, and the constructive part of utopian writings (the detailed description of the ideal socialist future), on the other.

Note that these distinctions underpin the asymmetry of Marx’s assessment of utopian socialism. Simply put: he is more enthusiastic and positive about the achievements of the first generation of utopians, by comparison with those of second and subsequent generations; and he is more enthusiastic and positive about the utopians’ criticism of contemporary society, by comparison with the utopians’ constructive endeavours.

The remainder of this section will focus on Marx’s disapproval of the constructive endeavours of the utopians.

In trying to organise and understand Marx’s various criticisms of utopianism, it is helpful to distinguish between foundational and non-foundational variants. (This distinction is intended to be exhaustive, in that all of his criticisms of utopianism will fall into one of these two categories.) Non-foundational criticisms of utopian socialism are those which, if sound, would provide us with a reason to reject views which might be held by, or even be characteristic of, utopian socialists, but which are not constitutive of their utopianism. That is, they would give us a reason to abandon the relevant beliefs, or to criticise those (including utopians) who held them, but they would not give us cause to reject utopianism as such. In contrast, foundational criticisms of utopian socialism are those which, if sound, would provide us with a reason to reject utopianism as such; that is, a reason to refrain from engaging in socialist design, a reason not to describe in relevant detail the socialist society of the future. (Of course, that reason might not be decisive, all things considered, but it would still count against utopianism per se.)

Many of Marx’s best-known criticisms of utopian socialism are non-foundational. For instance, in the Communist Manifesto , he complains that utopian socialists hold a mistaken “ahistorical” view of social change. The utopians purportedly fail to understand that the achievement of socialism depends on conditions which can only emerge at a certain stage of historical development. They might, for instance, recognise that there are strategic preconditions for socialism (for instance, the right blueprint and sufficient will to put it into practice), but (mistakenly on Marx’s account) imagine that those preconditions could have appeared at any point in time. This complaint is non-foundational in that one can accept that there are historical conditions for establishing a socialist society, and that the utopian socialists fail to understand this, without thereby having a reason to abandon utopianism as such. A commitment to the necessity and desirability of socialist design does not require one to hold an “ahistorical” view of social change.

Assessing the soundness of non-foundational criticisms, and their relevance to the utopian socialist tradition, is a complicated task (see Leopold 2018). However, even if sound and relevant, these criticisms would provide no reason to abandon utopianism as such . Consequently, they are pursued no further here. Instead, the focus is on the three main foundational arguments against utopianism that can be located in Marx’s writings; namely, that utopian plans and blueprints are necessarily undemocratic, impossible, and redundant (see Leopold 2016).

Marx’s first argument involves a normative claim that utopian plans and blueprints are undemocratic . (“Democracy” here connoting individual and collective self-determination, rather than political forms of governance.) The basic argument runs: that it is undemocratic to limit the self-determination of individuals; that providing a plan or blueprint for a socialist society limits the self-determination of individuals; and that therefore the provision of plans and blueprints for a socialist society is undemocratic. If we add in the assumption that undemocratic means are undesirable; then we can conclude that it is undesirable to provide plans or blueprints of a future socialist society. One central reason for resisting this argument is that it is hard to identify a plausible account of the conditions for self-determination, according to which it is necessarily true that merely providing a socialist plan or blueprint restricts self-determination. Indeed, one might heretically think that detailed plans and blueprints often tend to promote self-determination, helping individuals think about where it is they want to go, and how they want to get there.

Marx’s second argument rests on an epistemological claim that that utopian plans and blueprints are impossible , because they require accurate knowledge of the future of a kind which cannot be had. The basic argument starts from the assumption that to be of any use a blueprint must facilitate the construction of a future socialist society. Moreover, to facilitate the construction of a future socialist society a blueprint must be completely accurate; and to be completely accurate a blueprint must predict all the relevant circumstances of that future society. However, since it is not possible—given the complexity of the social world and the limitations of human nature—to predict all the relevant circumstances of that future society, we can conclude that socialist blueprints are of no use. One central reason for resisting this argument is that, whilst it is hard to deny that completely accurate plans are impossible (given the complexity of the world and the limitations of human understanding), the claim that only completely accurate plans are useful seems doubtful. Plans are not simply predictions, and providing less than wholly accurate plans for ourselves often forms part of the process whereby we help determine the future for ourselves (insofar as that is possible).

Marx’s third argument depends on an empirical claim that utopian plans and blueprints are unnecessary , because satisfactory solutions to social problems emerge automatically from the unfolding of the historical process without themselves needing to be designed. The basic argument runs as follows: that utopian blueprints describe the basic structure of the socialist society of the future; and that such blueprints are necessary if and only if the basic structure of future socialist society needs to be designed. However, given that the basic structure of the future socialist society develops automatically (without design assistance) within capitalist society; and that the role of human agency in this unfolding historical process is to deliver (not design) that basic structure, Marx concludes that utopian blueprints are redundant. Reasons for resisting this argument include scepticism about both Marx’s reasoning and the empirical record. Marx is certain that humankind does not need to design the basic structure of the future socialist society, but it is not really made clear who or what does that designing in its place. Moreover, the path of historical development since Marx’s day does not obviously confirm the complex empirical claim that the basic structure of socialist society is developing automatically within existing capitalism, needing only to be delivered (and not designed) by human agency.

This brief discussion suggests that there are cogent grounds for doubting Marx’s claim that utopian plans and blueprints are necessarily undemocratic, impossible, and redundant.

Finally, recall that Marx is less enthusiastic about the second and subsequent generations of utopians, than he is about the original triumvirate. We might reasonably wonder about the rationale for greater criticism of later utopians. It is important to recognise that it is not that second and subsequent generations make more or grosser errors than the original triumvirate. (Indeed, Marx appears to think that all these different generations largely held the same views, and made the same mistakes). The relevant difference is rather that, by comparison with their successors, this first generation were not to blame for those errors. In short, the rationale behind Marx’s preference for the first over the second and subsequent generations of utopian socialists is based on an understanding of historical development and an associated notion of culpability .

Marx held that the intellectual formation of this first generation took place in a historical context (the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) which was sufficiently developed to provoke socialist criticism, but not sufficiently developed for that socialist criticism to escape serious misunderstandings (Cohen 2000: 51). Since neither the material conditions of modern society, nor the historical agent capable of bringing socialism about, were sufficiently developed, this first generation were bound to develop faulty accounts of the nature of, and transition to, socialism. However, that defence—the historical unavoidability of error—is not available to subsequent generations who, despite significantly changed circumstances, hold fast to the original views of their intellectual forerunners. Marx maintains that more recent utopians, unlike the original triumvirate, really ought to know better.

At this point, we might be expected briefly to survey Marx’s legacy.

That legacy is often elaborated in terms of movements and thinkers. However, so understood, the controversy and scale of that legacy make brevity impossible, and this entry is already long enough. All we can do here is gesture at the history and mention some further reading.

The chronology here might provisionally be divided into three historical periods: from Marx’s death until the Russia Revolution (1917); from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989); and since 1989. It seems hard to say much that is certain about the last of these periods, but some generalisations about the first two might be hazarded.

That first period of “Classical Marxism” can be thought of in two generational waves. The first smaller group of theorists was associated with the Second International, and includes Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) and Plekhanov. The succeeding more activist generation includes Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), V.I. Lenin (1870–1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879–1940).

The second period is perhaps dominated by “Soviet Marxism” and the critical reaction from other Marxists that it provoked. The repressive bureaucratic regimes which solidified in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe repressed independent theoretical work, including scholarly editorial work on the writings of Marx and Engels. However, they also provoked a critical reaction in the form of a body of thought often called “Western Marxism”, usually said to include the work of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), and Althusser. The later parts of this period saw the continuing development of “Critical Theory”, as well as the birth of currents such as “Analytical Marxism” whose longer term impact is uncertain.

These first two periods are both partly covered by the Polish philosopher and historian of ideas, Leszek Kołakowski, in the final two volumes of his encyclopaedic three volume Main Currents of Marxism (1976 [1978]). A succinct critical account of the emergence and distinctive character of Western Marxism is provided by Perry Anderson in his Considerations on Western Marxism (1976). And some of the more philosophically interesting authors in this latter tradition are also covered elsewhere in this Encyclopaedia (see the Related Entries section below). Finally, and edging a little into the third of these historical periods, Christoph Henning offers an account of the (mis) readings of Marx—especially those replacing social theory with moral philosophy—in German philosophy from Heidegger to Habermas and beyond, in his Philosophy After Marx (2014).

However, we might also think of Marx’s legacy, less in terms of thinkers and movements, and more in terms of reasons for wanting to study Marx’s ideas. In that context, we would stress that this is not simply a question of the truth of his various substantive claims. The work of philosophers is, of course, also valued for the originality, insight, potential, and so on, that it may also contain. And, so judged, Marx’s writings have much to offer.

The various strands of Marx’s thought surveyed here include his philosophical anthropology, his theory of history, his critical engagement with the economic and political dimensions of capitalism, and a frustratingly vague outline of what might replace it. Whatever the connections between these threads, it seems implausible to suggest that Marx’s ideas form a system which has to be swallowed or rejected in its entirety. It might, for instance, be that Marx’s diagnosis looks more persuasive than his remedies. Readers may have little confidence in his solutions, but that does not mean that the problems he identifies are not acute.

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Adorno, Theodor W. | alienation | Althusser, Louis | critical theory | exploitation | Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Lukács, Georg [György] | revolution | socialism

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 7, 2019 | Original: November 9, 2009

As a university student, Karl Marx (1818-1883) joined a movement known as the Young Hegelians, who strongly criticized the political and cultural establishments of the day. He became a journalist, and the radical nature of his writings would eventually get him expelled by the governments of Germany, France and Belgium. In 1848, Marx and fellow German thinker Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto,” which introduced their concept of socialism as a natural result of the conflicts inherent in the capitalist system. Marx later moved to London, where he would live for the rest of his life. In 1867, he published the first volume of “Capital” (Das Kapital), in which he laid out his vision of capitalism and its inevitable tendencies toward self-destruction, and took part in a growing international workers’ movement based on his revolutionary theories.

Karl Marx’s Early Life and Education

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Prussia; he was the oldest surviving boy in a family of nine children. Both of his parents were Jewish, and descended from a long line of rabbis, but his father, a lawyer, converted to Lutheranism in 1816 due to contemporary laws barring Jews from higher society. Young Karl was baptized in the same church at the age of 6, but later became an atheist.

Did you know? The 1917 Russian Revolution, which overthrew three centuries of tsarist rule, had its roots in Marxist beliefs. The revolution’s leader, Vladimir Lenin, built his new proletarian government based on his interpretation of Marxist thought, turning Karl Marx into an internationally famous figure more than 30 years after his death.

After a year at the University of Bonn (during which Marx was imprisoned for drunkenness and fought a duel with another student), his worried parents enrolled their son at the University of Berlin, where he studied law and philosophy. There he was introduced to the philosophy of the late Berlin professor G.W.F. Hegel and joined a group known as the Young Hegelians, who were challenging existing institutions and ideas on all fronts, including religion, philosophy, ethics and politics.

Karl Marx Becomes a Revolutionary

After receiving his degree, Marx began writing for the liberal democratic newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, and he became the paper’s editor in 1842. The Prussian government banned the paper as too radical the following year. With his new wife, Jenny von Westphalen, Marx moved to Paris in 1843. There Marx met fellow German émigré Friedrich Engels, who would become his lifelong collaborator and friend. In 1845, Engels and Marx published a criticism of Bauer’s Young Hegelian philosophy entitled “The Holy Father.”

By that time, the Prussian government intervened to get Marx expelled from France, and he and Engels had moved to Brussels, Belgium, where Marx renounced his Prussian citizenship. In 1847, the newly founded Communist League in London, England, drafted Marx and Engels to write “The Communist Manifesto,” published the following year. In it, the two philosophers depicted all of history as a series of class struggles (historical materialism), and predicted that the upcoming proletarian revolution would sweep aside the capitalist system for good, making the workingmen the new ruling class of the world.

Karl Marx’s Life in London and “Das Kapital”

With revolutionary uprisings engulfing Europe in 1848, Marx left Belgium just before being expelled by that country’s government. He briefly returned to Paris and Germany before settling in London, where he would live for the rest of his life, despite being denied British citizenship. He worked as a journalist there, including 10 years as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, but never quite managed to earn a living wage, and was supported financially by Engels. In time, Marx became increasingly isolated from fellow London Communists, and focused more on developing his economic theories. In 1864, however, he helped found the International Workingmen’s Association (known as the First International) and wrote its inaugural address. Three years later, Marx published the first volume of “Capital” (Das Kapital) his masterwork of economic theory. In it he expressed a desire to reveal “the economic law of motion of modern society” and laid out his theory of capitalism as a dynamic system that contained the seeds of its own self-destruction and subsequent triumph of communism. Marx would spend the rest of his life working on manuscripts for additional volumes, but they remained unfinished at the time of his death, of pleurisy, on March 14, 1883.

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Karl Marx Sociologist: Contributions and Theory

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On This Page:

Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory proposed by Karl Marx in the 19th century, and Marxists are those who ascribe to the ideas of Marxism.

Karl Marx was a German philosopher interested in exploring the relationship between the economy and the people working within the economic system.

Marx’s theory was strongly based on the struggles of the working class during the Industrial Revolution in Europe. He explained how there are power relationships between the capitalists and the workers, which are exploitative and would eventually cause class conflict.

According to Marx, the workers are those from a low social class, which he termed the proletariat, whereas those few in charge, the wealthy bosses, owners, and managers, are what he termed the bourgeoisie.

The proletariat are the individuals who perform labor that is then taken and sold by the bourgeoisie so that they themselves receive profit while the workers receive minimal wages.

Noteworthy writings of Marxism include Capital by Marx and The Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Friedrich Engels. These writings describe the features of Marxist ideology, including the struggle of the working class, capitalism, and how a classless society is needed to end the class conflict.

Key Takeaways

• Karl Marx was a German philosopher who, in the 19th century, began exploring the relationship between the economy and the people who work within the economic system.
• The basic idea of Marx’s theory is that society is characterized by the struggle between the workers and those in charge. The workers are those of lower social classes, which he termed the proletariat.
• The few in charge, who are the bosses, owners, and managers of an upper social class, are what he termed the bourgeoisie. The proletariat are the individuals who perform the labor, while the bourgeoisie obtains the profits from this labor. From this system, Marx argued that the workers are exploited while those in power get more powerful and wealthier.
• The workers are viewed as slaves of the bourgeoisie, given wages for their labor that is the minimum subsidence so that they can just about survive while also depending on their labor that they cannot simply quit (Marx & Engels, 2019).
• The writings ‘Capital’ by Marx and ‘The Communist Manifesto’ written by Marx and Friedrich Engels are noteworthy pieces that lay out what is now referred to as Marxism.
• These writings discuss capitalism, which is believed to eventually stagnate due to the increased struggle between the social classes.
• Marxist ideology predicts that there will be a proletariat revolution whereby capitalism will end, to be replaced by communism.

The Basic Principles Of Marx’s Theory

Class struggle.

Marx argued that there were two social classes; the working-class laborers, known as the proletariat, and the wealthy bourgeoise, who controlled the workers.

Marx argued that there is a struggle between the social classes. While the bourgeoisie is concerned with the means of producing via the laborers, those who conduct the labor, the proletariat , want to end this exploitation.

Marx explained that there is a constant conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. While the bourgeoisie aims to make as much profit as possible by exploiting the labor of others, the proletariat is dissatisfied with this exploitation and wants to end it.

Class tensions are thought to increase with the opposing desires of those who want bigger profits and the workers who defend their right to fair pay and working conditions.

Competition in the market and the desire for bigger profits compels the bourgeoisie to further exploit their workers, who defend their rights and working conditions. These opposing desires of pushing the rate of exploitation in opposite directions create class tensions.

Over time, there is a broader division of labor and increased use of machinery to complete the labor. Marx and Engels argued that with this came an increase in the burden of toil, whether by the work hours getting longer, an increase in the amount of work in a given time, or by the increased speed of the machinery.

The workers are viewed as slaves of the bourgeoisie and the machine, given wages for their labor that is the minimum subsidence so they can just about survive while also depending on their labor (Marx & Engels, 2019).

The struggle between social classes was initially confined to individual factories. However, as capitalism matured, personal struggles became generalized to coalitions across factories and eventually manifested at societal levels (Rummel, 1977).

Marxists believe that the division between classes will widen with the exploitation of the workers deteriorating so severely that the social structure collapses and transforms into a proletarian revolution . A classless society will pursue erasing any exploitation or political authority (Rummel, 1977).

Theory of Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system in which private individuals have the means of control over their own property, with the motivation to make as much profit as possible.

Marx describes capitalists as those who exploit the hard work of the laborers and pay them as little as possible to ensure the highest profits. The capitalists believe they are entitled to the profits made from their workers’ labor, which Marx viewed as theft.

Marx described the capitalists as the bourgeoisie business owners who organized the means of production, such as any tools or machinery used, and were entitled to any profit made.

Marxists believe that most societies are capitalist. That such a system is accepted without the need for violence or coercion is said to reflect the fact that the capitalists have a strong influence over ideas in society (Rose, 2005).

Marx saw profit as theft since the capitalists are stealing the hard work of the laborers, selling goods and services for an enormous profit while paying the laborers as little as possible. Workers’ labor is bought and sold like any other commodity.

That such a system is accepted without the need for violence or coercion reflects the fact that the capitalists have a strong influence over ideas in society (Rosen, 2005).

Marx viewed capitalism as an unstable system that would eventually result in a series of crises. The means of exploitation built into a capitalist economic system will be the source of social revolt and ultimately lead to capitalism”s dismantling.

Marx and Engels proposed that there would eventually be a proletariat revolution caused by continued exploitation by capitalists. The workers will revolt due to increasingly worse working conditions and wages.

In The Communist Manifesto , Marx and Engels proposed that after the proletariat revolution, the means of production from the bourgeoisie would end and be replaced with collective ownership over economic assets. This is a move from capitalism to communism.

The result of the revolution is that capitalism will be replaced by a classless society in which private property will be replaced with collective ownership. This will mean that society will become communist. With private property abolished, the means of production will come to a common agreement, what is called the communal ownership of goods.

Communism would aim to create a classless society in which no social class would exploit the labor of the other. In a communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, enrich, and promote the laborer’s existence (Marx & Engels, 2019).

According to Marxism, the key features of a communist society are that there would be no private property or inherited wealth, steeply graduated income tax, centralized control of the banking, communication, and transport industries, and free public education (Marx & Engels, 2019).

Conflict Theory

Karl Marx is known as the developer of conflict theory . This is the idea that society is in a state of perpetual conflict because of two or more groups with competing and incompatible interests. It is the theory that power struggles and dynamics drive societal change.

Marx concentrated on the conflict between the social classes: those of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat . The power the bourgeoisie hold can be found in their material resources, accumulated wealth, and social status.

As capitalism develops, there are fewer but more powerful individuals in the upper class, which creates conflict with a majority oppressed class. The two groups are in a struggle, and resources are unjustly distributed to the few.

Marx reasoned that as the social conditions worsened for the workers (e.g., through lower pay), they would develop a class consciousness that revealed that their exploitation was at the hands of the capitalist. The workers can make demands to ease the conflict, but conditions would eventually get worse again.

According to Marx, the only way to end the cycle of conflict is to bring about communism.

Theory Of Alienation

Alienation means the lack of power, control, and fulfillment experienced by workers in capitalist societies in which the means of producing goods are privately owned and controlled.

Marx described a division of labor , meaning that the production workers increasingly feel separated from their work. Workers have moved away from an artisanal approach to work when one person works on one product.

With the increase in machinery, technological advancements, and assembly lines where many people work on one product, there is a loss of meaning to individual workers (Marx, 1992).

As this division of labor increases along with the extent of production required for the market, the workers become more dependent on their labor for mere survival. As capitalist production becomes more technical, the workers’ productivity increases, but the final product of their labor is not for the worker to enjoy – it is the property of the capitalist (Prychitko, 2002).

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels suggest that under capitalism, the proletariat loses all individual character, becoming ‘an appendage of the machine’; thus, their work becomes alien (Marx & Engels, 2019).

The proletariat loses agency over their work lives, instead, this is determined by the bourgeoisie, including when and how long to work. Thus, the workers view their labor as something alien to them.

Marx describes alienated labor as forced and involuntary labor in which the worker finds no purpose, pleasure, contentment, or power. The worker feels isolated and insignificant, seeing their labor as purely for wages (Mukhopadhyay, 2020).

As the division of labor increases along with the extent of production required for the market, the workers become more dependent on their labor for mere survival. Their productivity increases as capitalist production become more technical, but as a result, the final product is not for them to enjoy, rather, it is the property of the capitalist (Prychitko, 2002).

Thus, the workers view their labor as something alien. Not only the object but the process of production is alien, for it is no longer a creative activity.

Marx describes alienated labor in his writings as forced and involuntary labor in which the worker finds no purpose, pleasure, contentment, or power. The worker feels isolated and insignificant, seeing their labor as purely for wages (Mukhopadhyay, 2020).

Historical Materialism

Marx proposed a theory of historical materialism in which he describes stages or epochs that societies pass through. These are primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and advanced communism.

Marx used historical materialism to attempt to explain where society has come from, why it is the way that it is, and where it is heading.

Primitive communism was a time when society was free of social class divisions, and there were simply hunters and gathers who obtained enough food for survival. Since there was not a surplus of production, there was no exploitation.

Slave society is thought of as the first stage of exploitation. This is when there was a division between the wealthy aristocrats and those who were slaves. This epoch gave way to more advanced productive forces, with the means of production being by the people who were the property of the slaveowners.

Feudalism was a dominant social system in medieval Europe, and society was divided into landowners and land occupiers. It was a system in which people were given land and protection by the nobles, who had to work and fight for them in return. Essentially, in feudalism, the landowners exploited the land occupiers.

Marx proposed that the current society is a capitalist one in which there are private property owners who exploit the labor of their workers, whom they pay as little as possible to obtain high profits. This epoch is viewed as the wealthiest in society exploiting the poorest.

Marx’s prediction for the next epoch of society is that it will be an advanced communist one. In a communist society, there would be shared resources and wealth and no exploitation.

This was Marx’s idea of a utopia in which the system benefits most people in society rather than a small minority.

Critical Theory

Marxism would come to facilitate the development of critical theories and cultural studies.

Critical theory  is a philosophical approach to culture — especially literature — that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures of power that produce and constrain culture.

The first and most notable critical theorists are the members of the Frankfurt School (Bohman, 2005).

The critical method of analysis has far-reaching academic influence. Often, critical theorists are preoccupied with critiquing modernity and capitalist society, the definition of what it means to be free in society, and the detection of wrongs in society.

Critical theorists often use a specific interpretation of Marxist philosophy focusing on economic and political ideas such as commodification, reification, fetishization, and the critique of mass culture.

Stages of Societal Development in Marxism

Marxism believes that economic systems in societies go through five stages, these are:

1. Primitive Communism

Marx and Engels conceptualized society prior to antiquity as free of social class division as hunter-gatherers gathered just enough to survive. Because everyone in this system worked for subsistence, there was no surplus production, thus making exploitation impossible.

2. Antiquity

Antiquity, to Marx, represented the first stage of exploitation between two classes, as the dynamic between aristocrats and their slaves and servants characterized society.

3. Feudalism

The second stage of exploitation in Marx’s vision of society was medieval society. Divided into landowners and occupiers, the lords and landlords exploited those who cultivated their lands by taking a portion of their yield.

4. Capitalist Society

Marxism focuses most heavily on the ills of contemporary capitalist society. In this system, anyone could trade with anyone and were free to make money from their own goods and services.

However, according to Marx and Engels, this just as powerfully bred injustice through the exploitation of the poor by the rich. Marx and Engels were particularly inspired by the conditions of their era, the industrial revolution.

Karl Marx was born in what is now Western Germany, and he experienced England at the turn of the Industrial Revolution.

Witnessing first-hand the exploitation of British factory workers, the pair conducted a series of profiles of laborers and collaboratively authored The Communist Manifesto (Prychitko, 1991).

Although the ideas of Marxism seemed to take hold by the first half of the twentieth century, as the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the spread of communism came to define much of Eastern Europe, their association — the USSR — began to reject Marxist ideology, entering a transition toward private property rights and a market exchange system.

The societies of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and the other Soviet states shifted to a capitalist and consumerist system, and the USSR collapsed in 1991 (Prychitko, 2002).

5. Advanced Communism

After the fall of the current capitalist system, Marx predicted a utopian society involving shared resources, wealth, and equality.

Strengths of Marxism

Marx’s ideas of society are a source of many useful insights and arguments, many of which remain relevant for modern analyses of society. While some ideas may have lost some relevance, the legacy of Marxism has endured (Burawoy & Wright, 2001).

Karl Marx has remained a prominent and influential figure in the world of sociology. In particular, his ideas on conflict theory gave rise to other conflict theories that developed later, including race-conflict theory, gender-conflict theory, and intersectional theory .

These theories provide sociologists with ways to understand power, control, freedom, and exploitation in society.

Due to Marx’s understanding of capitalism, we have a better understanding of how society functions and why we may have certain ideas about labor.

Marx provided the understanding that capitalism may be the cause of why society holds these views and how it teaches us to be competitive and conformist.

Many institutions are believed to use capitalist ideology to justify inequalities. For instance, educational institutions socialize children into working hard and being obedient.

With the increase of technological advancements in the workplace and the seemingly excessive number of products in the modern world – a lot of which would be considered non-essential- supports Marx’s ideas about capitalism.

Marxism can help sociologists understand how past revolutions have occurred in capitalist societies. It is considered a social theory of vital importance for understanding the issues and possibilities of social change and social reproduction in modern societies.

While not every element within Marxism is sustainable, Marxist ideas can be built upon to challenge and transform it (Burawoy & Wright, 2001).

Criticisms of Marxism

Marxism can be criticized for being overly simplistic in the idea of society being split into two social classes. There are different levels of wealth in society, so it is more likely that there are several social classes.

Likewise, Marx’s theory ignores other factors that contribute to social inequality, such as a person’s race and religion. A person’s gender is also mostly ignored by Marxism. Feminists would suggest that gender provides a greater social division in society rather than social class.

Marxism is argued to be a doctrine with little relevance for serious social change. It is said to be ideological for mobilizing political parties and social movements but lacks scientific credibility (Burawoy & Wright, 2001). It is thought to be unlikely that there would be total social class equality in a communist society.

Further, communist ideas have been introduced in some countries and have not fared well. For instance, there was a fall of communism in the former socialist state of the USSR. Therefore, a Marxist society, while promising in theory, may not be fully sustainable unless reconstructed.

In general, there are negative connotations about those who are unemployed, considering those who take too much time off as lazy and holding the belief that more belongings make people happier.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the main goals of marxism.

The main goal of Marxism is to achieve a classless society that is not only adopted in one society but on a global scale.

Marx’s idea was to design a social system that eliminates exploitation and differences in power between groups of people.

In communism, the proletariat has political power, and private property is abolished. In a communist society, private ownership will be replaced with collective ownership over economic assets.

What Is The Importance of Marxism In Society?

Karl Marx is one of the most prominent and influential figures in sociological theory. These ideas on conflict theory have given rise to different conflict theories, such as race-conflict theory, gender-conflict theory, and intersectional theory.

Marx’s explanations of capitalism have provided a deep understanding of how society functions and enabled people to think critically about the labor they do.

Marx further offered that capitalism may be why society holds particular views about labor, including negative judgments about those who do not work and why people are competitive and conformist.

Is Marxism Still Relevant Today?

While some ideas of Marxism may be outdated and may not necessarily be a comprehensive theory for social change, they can still help understand some of the key social mechanisms in a society divided by class.

Marxism offers a way to understand history and economics, as well as an explanation of the global capitalist crisis. It can be argued that exploitation is still at the heart of a capitalist system enforced by those in the upper social classes.

Marxism also captures how capitalism develops and impacts specific world regions, specifically how some regions are developed unevenly relative to one another. Marxists would argue that unregulated commodification comes with environmental hazards, the costs of which are becoming increasingly clear (Fasenfest, 2018).

What were the criticisms of Marx on capitalism?

Karl Marx criticized capitalism for its inherent exploitation of the working class, who, he argued, were not fairly compensated for their labor. He also highlighted the alienation workers experience due to a lack of control over the production process and the products they create.

Marx further criticized capitalism’s tendency towards periodic economic crises and its creation of social inequality through the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, or the capitalist class.

Burawoy, M., & Wright, E. O. (2001). Sociological marxism. In Handbook of sociological theory (pp. 459-486). Springer, Boston, MA.

Callinicos, A. (2011). The revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx. Haymarket Books.

Fasenfest, D. (2018). Is Marx still relevant?.  Critical Sociology , 44(6), 851-855.

Marx, K. (1873).  Capital: A critical analysis of capitalist production . Humboldt.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1967). The communist manifesto . 1848. Trans. Samuel Moore. London: Penguin, 15.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2019). The communist manifesto. In Ideals and Ideologies  (pp. 243-255). Routledge.

Mukhopadhyay, R. (2020). Karl Marx”s Theory of Alienation . Available at SSRN 3843057.

Poulantzis, N. (1975). Social Classes in Contemporary Capitalism . London: New Left Books.

Prychitko, D. L. (Ed.). (2002).  Markets, Planning, and Democracy: Essays after the Collapse of Communism . Edward Elgar Publishing.

Rosen, M. (2005). Marx, Karl. Ed. Edward Craig. The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , 619-631.

Rummel, R. J. (1977). Understanding conflict and war: Vol. 3: Conflict in perspective.  Beverly Hills: Sage.

130 Karl Marx Essay Topics & Examples

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• Similarities and Difference between Hegel and Marx In this sense, the main function of philosophy is to document what has happened in the world. In fact, to Marx, labor is the main cause of alienation.
• Marxist Analysis Therefore, Marxist analysis of a capitalism system on the international scale shows that it entails accumulation of capital from the poor countries into the rich countries thus causes global inequality and class struggles among nations.
• Theoretical Ideas of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim in “Practice Theory” Marx is for the opinion that this state of affairs is just the same as the previous feudal system of existence in the society.
• Marx and Weber and How their Views Differ on Religion Capitalism Marx attributes the emergence of the capitalist system to the historical advancement of the material aspect of the society. Capitalism rose as the new mode of production after the emergence of government control and […]
• Karl Marx, Max Weber and Talcott Parsons Contributions in Sociology The nineteenth century witnessed the existence of some of the most revolutionary minds in sociology. Though their contributions to sociology are numerous, their works on social change and order mark major turning points in the […]
• Philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Marx The philosophical dilemma is how to do it, because in the overwhelming majority of cases, a human being is driven by the desire.
• Karl Marx’s Sociology and Conflict Theory Thus, in Marx’s opinion, Capitalism causes the alienation of the masses and the constantly growing indignation of the proletariat for being exploited by the bourgeois.
• Karl Marx’s Concept of Alienation According to Marx, that is called the externalization of a worker in his product. A man does not choose the productive activity, he is a part of it only because he is forced to he […]
• Rene Descartes and Karl Marx’s Philosophy I have seen that Rene Descartes contribution in philosophy and natural science stood the test of time; therefore, he became a hero’ on the other hand, Karl Marx’s contribution in social science did not stand […]
• Marx and the Young Hegelians Many of the writings of the Young Hegelians focused on the refutation of religion and need to replace religion with philosophy as the moral criterion for the society and means for understanding history.
• Assumptions of Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx The aftermath of the work should act as a mirror to the human being. On the other hand Spencer argues that human nature is flexible and is in the process of advancement.
• The Marxist Theory on Class Struggle: The History of Human Relations has been one of Class Struggle The moneyed class or the capitalists, those who own the means of production are grouped into one class, while the labourers and the proletariat belong to another; they are also known as the exploiting and […]
• Karl Marx’s Philosophy: Camera Obscura The creation of thoughts, notions and consciousness are initially intertwined with the material activity of human beings. Creation of ideas and intellectual ability begin to be seen at this phase as the direct product of […]
• Karl Marx and His Contributions This is due to the fact that individuals can effectively plan what is of necessity to them and the society in general.
• Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx’ Views on Sociology of Religion In this paper, the theoretical approaches developed by Durkheim and Marx will be compared to explain the connection between religion and society and understand if it is correct to identify society in terms of religion, […]
• The Conceptions of Power and Domination Found in the Works of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Michel Foucault Concepts of power and domination according to Karl Marx Karl Marx concept of power and domination is founded on his proposition that defines distinctions of class possessions.
• Karl Marx’s Critique of Capitalism They were enslaved by the bourgeoisie and machinery hence, they became a majority and were empowered in the light of the competitive bourgeoisie class, which created commercial conflicts and fluctuated the earning of the working […]
• Durkheim’s Functionalism and Marx’s Conflict Theory According to Durkheim, there is vital interconnectivity of all the elements of any society that share common ideas and principles, and the sum of these elements is not as great as the society itself.
• Exegeses-Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas by Karl Marx The ideas of the ruling class, therefore, are the ideology of the given society. In their writing, Marx and Engels distinguish two different classes, which is the class that is the material force of the […]
• Marx, Weber, Durkheim Respond to “Gattaca” Film We will start modeling the sociologists’ response to a probable variant of future society with an analysis of the views on society and class and the way they are applicable to the situation presented in […]
• Analysis of Marx’s Alienation Theory It is important to note that the alienation from the product of labor and the alienation from the process of labor share some commonalities.
• Karl Marx and the “Communist Manifesto” He outlined a framework of the future course of events on which he based prescriptions for a strategy on the part of those who wished to change the nature of society.= The Communist Manifesto was […]
• Marx vs. Weber: Different Points of View on Human Nature, Power, Resistance, Society, and Politics Though the ideas of Marx and Weber may seem to be similar in some ways, it is wrong to believe that these theorists took the same positions; Marx found it obligatory to critique the activities […]
• Marx, Weber, and Bourdieu on Societal Stratification In developed countries, this space changes in the fact that those at the top of the society can assume positions thought to be for the very lowest in the society.
• Dostoevsky’s and Marx’s Works Review In the first place, the point stated in the Manifesto is that human nature might, can, and even should subdue a regime of power in a country.
• Karl Marx’s Social Theory of Alienation The discussion will focus on the meaning of alienation and the structures that promote it in the capitalist society. Workers were subjected to poor working conditions that led to injuries and monotony because they did […]
• Sociological Theories: The Class Theory by Karl Marx The class theory by Karl Marx is one of the most popular sociological approaches to discussing the processing that happens in the community.
• Science vs. Religion: Marx’s and Spinoza’s Teachings Marxism explained the true causes of exploitation and further offered the scientific remedy of revolution and proletariat to cure the social ills of exploitation.
• Political Economy: The “Capital” Book by Karl Marx The main questions of Marx’s scholarly inquiry are the birth of capitalism and its importance, the relationship between capital and labor, and the role of money. The other metaphor employed in the text is a […]
• Marx’s, Engels’, Weber’s Ideas on World Development In a functional analysis of society, each of its interconnected parts the economy, the family, and the government interacted on the basis of a system of shared norms and values.
• Friedrich Nietzsche’s vs. Karl Marx’s Philosophy Moreover, the philosopher believed that society’s progress and scientific achievements contributed to the lowering of the role of Christianity and religion was a burden for society.
• The Theory of Production Relations by Karl Marx The theory of production relations refers to the relationship that exists between those who own the means of production, mainly capitalists or bourgeoisie, and those who do not, who are the workers or the proletariat.
• Marx’s Thesis on the Fetishism of Commodities Moreover, the workers that are required for the brand’s success also become commodities, as mentioned in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
• The Function of Religion: Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx The function of religion is, in my opinion, closely related to people’s need to have a major set of moral guidelines, making individuals more confident and satisfied and societies more viable.
• Karl Marx’s View on Value, Price, and Profit As a consequence, profit is defined as the surplus value generated by labor above and beyond the amount needed for reproduction, as represented by wages and their buying power, such as the price of commodities, […]
• Marx’s and Hochschild’s Views on People’s Work Hochschild argues that the management of emotions in exchange for a wage leads to the “transmutation” of private life into a social one.
• John Stuart Mill’s and Karl Marx’s Conceptions of Ideal Society and Liberty When comparing the two perspectives of liberty and ideal society, it is necessary to note that both philosophers find the liberty to be an intrinsic feature of a human being.
• Marx’s Ideas in Relation to the TV Series Through the lens of popular culture, the notion of upholding The Simpsons as a segment of the civilization that lingers in people’s minds all through a nuclear apocalypse appears strange and ironic.
• Karl Marx: Philosophical Views However, in the article, the narrator points out how Karl Marx contributed positively to the society, based on the belief that he concerned about the involvement of both the social and the economic factors in […]
• Political Theory Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Mill, and Kant After the development of individuation during the period of the Renaissance, the majority of political thinkers developed their theories based on the individual’s relationship with economic factors.
• World History in The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx Communism is the political and economic teaching which goal is to abolish private property and a profit-based economy and introduce public ownership and communal control of the resources instead.
• Marx’s Theory of the Commodification Process That the system of capitalism is progressively undergoing transformations as to embrace globalization is a true reflection that the system is running out of control of the states.
• Karl Marx Theory and the Russian Revolution It was the interpretations of Marxism theories by Lenin that were the force behind the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union.
• Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Robert Owen: Time Travel Smith, a pioneer of political economy, would be interested in analyzing the current economic situation in the country and, perhaps, even suggest ways for the country to overcome the economic crisis.
• Industrialization According to Marx and Engels According to them Industrialization increased the divide between the rich and the poor and shackled the poor to the chains of servility and penury.
• Marx and Factory Occupations in Argentina A combination of elaborate fines, threats, and punishments was utilized to overcome the ambivalence of the workers and the multitude of ways they used to limit output and exhaustion.
• Capitalism and Industrialization in the “Communist Manifesto” by Marx In fact, the Communist Manifesto is clear in indicating that industrialization was a process that led to the overall improvement of society in doing away with the hardships of the majority of the population.
• Karl Marx Ideologies on Major Issues He argued that the main purpose of the state is to protect its independence and integrity to maintain the social organization and allow for the “universal spirit” to develop in people’s life.
• Communism of Karl Marx and the Soviet Union The seizure of Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks gave birth to the communist movement in 1917, when and died in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and in 1991, when the Soviet Union […]
• Marx and Weber in Relation to History: Materialism and Existential Idealism If modern capitalist societies’ structure can be compared to the diamond, with rich and poor people on its extreme ends and with people representing a middle class in between, Marx’s communism corresponds to the form […]
• Human Nature in Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” and Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground“ In such an arrangement, there is a tendency to have the opinion that the development of one individual is a benchmark for the development of another, which eventually leads to laxity among some individuals.
• Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto Analysis The class-consciousness in the capitalist society like United States, according to Marx was instilled in the minds of feudal and capitalist bourgeoisies and not in the working class proletariat.
• A Re-Thinking on Our Way of Thinking by Karl Marx The exploitation would continue and because of internal contradictions in the capitalist order, the severer the competitions among the capitalists, the worse would be the fate of the proletariat.
• Rousseau’s and Marx’s Works Problems: Discussion The abolishment of the bourgeois individuality Marx considers that the concept of the bourgeois individuality demands reformations and abolishment, great changes to the new ideas and ideals. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat […]
• Karl Marx’s Ideas on Private Property At the same time, the philosopher believed that in order to realize the full potential of humanity and every individual, the practice of alienated labor, as well as private ownership and class division associated with […]
• Political Discourse: Marx, Locke, and Rousseau Applying this idea to human society, the existence of multiple opinions and perspectives on the same issues can be taken as the guaranty of the emergence of some new concepts that appear while debating or […]
• Marx’s and Rousseau’s Views on Private Property The material aspect is the center of attention in this theory because Marx believes that material conditions determine the essential element of life both for individuals and for society as a whole.
• Karl Marx’s Economic Philosophy The competitive price of the commodity-A, in the end, will be twice the price of the commodity-B irrespective of the physical input values1.
• “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” by Marx & Engels They voiced their discontent with the capitalist mode of production instead of focusing on the possibilities of adapting a political theory that will favor collectivism in a classless society. In the third chapter of the […]
• Legitimacy in Machiavelli’s and Marx’s Works In his book ‘The Prince’, Machiavelli evades the subject of legitimacy simply because of his rather cynical stand on the issue of legitimate governance.
• Karl Marx on Social Classes in a Letter to John Mayer I share your sentiments on alienation and pain in lower-class imprisonment by the ruling class who have the resources to manipulate and twist social, religious, development, and political aspects of the society as opined by […]
• Karl Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right The fight against religion is, therefore seen as a fight against the whole of humanity. The emancipation of Germans is the emancipation of man.
• Estranged Labour in Karl Marx’s Manuscripts Indeed, it also fails to expound on the factors leading to the separation between capital and labour in the same way as capital and land.
• Idealism and Materialism in Karl Marx’s Writings German ideologists contend that the country has undergone incomparable revolution characterized with the decomposition of Hegelian philosophy, sweeping of the powers of the past, subjection of mighty empires into immediate doom, and hurling of heroes […]
• “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Since the political views of the leaders were shaped in a different social environment and by the time Marx and Engels were coining The Communist Manifesto, European economy and society had undergone considerable development, there […]
• Sociological Theories by Marx, Weber, Mills et al. The study by Zweigenhaft and Domhoff revealed that the U.S.is still at a crucial juncture in terms of the relations between the African Americans and the whites.
• Alienation in Marx’s Sociological Views In Marxist theory, exploitation is a complex issue that is aimed at creating a specific form of the interdependence of people’s material interests based on the following criteria: the principle of inverse interdependent welfare; the […]
• “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” by Karl Marx The chronotope of the writing reveals the periodization of the history of this event, and the author considers the political occurrences that led to the takeover.
• Film Analysis “What If Marx Was Right?” The film outlines the relation between industrial revolution, the price for commodities, alienation, the lengths of the working day and capitalism.
• Conflict in Hobbes’, Marx’s, Rousseau’s, Plato’s Works Therefore, conflict can be defined in terms of the struggle to get wealth and power that are usually the main issues that propel people to fight.
• Gender Studies: Engels, Marx and Gilman’ Views Comparison The line of Engel’s argumentation, in this respect, is concerned with his assumption that even though the male-dominated society does recognize and cherish women, on the account of their ability to act as the agents […]
• Capitalism in Marx’s, Weber’s, Durkheim’s Theories Conceptualizing change as a feature of social modernity using analogies such as growth, cyclical renewal, progress, modernity, development, and evolution gives us presuppositions for understanding the world and the concept of individual, society, and culture. […]
• Marx’s Theory in “Too Big to Fail” by A. Sorkin The book/movie gives a summary of the first phase of the fiscal crisis of 2007-2010 from the beginning of 2008 to the decision to create the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
• Hegel and Marx on Civil Society and Human Freedom First of all, the paper will divide the concepts of freedom and civil society in some of the notions that contribute to their definitions.
• History in Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party The Manifesto of the Communist Party is a powerful source of information about the most crucial force in history that is the attention to social and personal interests, the peculiarities of the bourgeoisie with its […]
• Capitalism in Adam Smith’s and Karl Marx’s Views Specifically, the paper examines some of the key concepts and the underlying assumptions of each theorist concerning factors that drive capitalism in the 21st century. The rise of capitalism in the 21st century is largely […]
• Karl Marx: Critique of Capitalism His point of view was that the globalization would inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in the hands of relatively small groups of economic actors, and that will entail the emergence of the economic […]
• Karl Marx: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World? One of the most important aspects that should not be disregarded is that many scholars believe that some of the theories that were suggested by the philosopher are reasonable and can be applied to modern […]
• Smith’s vs. Marx’s Economic Value Theories Smith elaborated the idea of the exchange value of labor, as well as the use value of labor in coming up with the theory.
• Rawls and Marx on Distributive Justice However, the real issue here is whether the resources that are produced in the society can be shared equally among the members of the society because of the nature and orientation of people in the […]
• Civil Rights Movement by E. Durkheim and K. Marx The theories will also be used to predict the future of racism in the United States. The level of segregation experienced in the country led to new interferences and constraints.
• Karl Marx’ Views on Religion Role in Social Structures To Karl, the key element of religion is that it is a human product.”it is man who makes religion, not religion that makes man”; that it is a product of those in power, controlling production.
• Class Conflict: Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin Ideas Bakunin based his analysis on the European enlightenment to argue that class conflict is a result of the struggle between the learned and the ruling class in society.
• John Locke’s and Karl Marx’s Economic Ideas In his article Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of Value of Money, John Locke outlines the main theoretical provisions of what later became known as the amonetary’ […]
• Karl Marx and Max Weber’ Views on Sociological Theory Marx believed that the conflict of interests and the fight for resources were the basic driving forces contributing to the society’s evolution and social change.
• Marx’s Concept of Primitive Accumulation Therefore, Marx confirms the relationship between political economy and the primitive accumulation of capital. Moreover, Marx explains in respect to the relationships or similarities existing between the primitive accumulation of capital and political economy.
• Karl Marx’s Ideology and Education Many scholars these days support the opinion that Marx’s views, ideas, and teachings are old-fashioned and could only be applied for the society, politics, economy, and industry of his time.
• Marx, Wallerstein and Baudrillard In its attempt to explain social change, the method relies on the concept of historical materialism, the rise and development of capitalism as a mode of production and the study of opposites.
• Marx and Keynes on Say’s Law The stimulus program will ensure that the existing companies produce more products in the economy and at the same time enhance the capacity of the small companies to produce the right and required products in […]
• Why Marxism is Scientific The second section illustrates that the history of the development of Marxism is scientific and it conforms to the progressive development common to the development of scientific knowledge.
• Difference between Solow and Marx’s Theories in Relation to Technological Process Change However, Solow accounted in his theory that there is a portion of the economic growth that is often not accounted for, and this can be attributed to the changes in technology.
• Taxes, Capitalism, and Democracy: Karl Marx vs. Plato The claims in the media belong to the camp of freedom and community. Marx argued that taxation is one of the reasons that will force workers to challenge the elites in society.
• How Realistic or Desirable Was Marx’s Idea of Communism? This was to be made possible through nationalization of the means of production and putting them under the control of the workers; the individuals who he viewed to be the major producers of wealth.
• Karl Marx’s Life and Philosophical Ideas Karl Marx expressed his sentiments on alienation and pain in the lower class workers imprisonment by the private individuals who have the resources to manipulate and twist social, development, and welfare aspects of the masses […]
• Equality to All? Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” In many western nations, the classical movement was driven by the quest to transform the economy and the political philosophy. The intention was to meet the needs and aspirations of the colonial powers.
• Karl Marx’s Take on Work Process This is an advantage to the employee because when it comes to firing employees, the first people to go are those that the employer does not know.
• We Still Have a Lot to Learn from Marx However, what Hitchens misses from Das Kapital is Marx’s vital clarification of the social role of money and capital.”The value of commodities more and more expands into an embodiment of human labour in the abstract…one […]
• Social Conflict in the Work of Marx and Weber Due to the variations in the forms of power, there is usually the likelihood of manifestation of conflict. This essay seeks to examine the status of social conflict in the work of both Karl Marx […]
• Karl Marx’s Argument Capitalism, according to Karl Marx is the weakened method of analyzing democracy as it never pertains to the provisioning of democracy, no matter how much the capitalist describe their actions to be more of a […]
• Growth of Modernity by Marx and Weber Marx’s theory would be correctly interpreted to mean that the working conditions experienced today is a product of the resistance that people in the industrialization era put up in order to deal with the dehumanizing […]
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx: The Role of Money in Human Life Marx and Rousseau were eager to improve the society they lived in and make people free; to achieve these purposes, it is necessary to prove that money does not have such power to provide all […]
• Marx’s Understanding of the Concept of Alienation and the Idea of an Immanent Criticism The first kind of alienation is a factor to the second kind of alienation as it eliminates the laborers feeling of possession and the end price of the finished product.
• Classical Social Theory: In Defense of Marx’s Ideas Spencer, in his turn, perfected Comte’s work, while Marx’s efforts helped envision the society as a mixture of social and economical interactions.
• Socialism and Communism after Marx However; Karl Marx failed in his Marxism theory as a result of the establishment of the middle class. Following Karl Marx’s demise in 1844, Friedrich Engels who was became the narrator of the Marxism theory […]
• Karl Marx on Private Property All the objects or property that someone possesses exist outside of the body and personality and so, is without a doubt private property, if that person is the one who has contributed efforts in the […]
• The Economic Problem for Marx According to the theory of surplus-value, it was established that there were different classes in the society and the ruling class produced a social surplus product. Thus, according to Marx, the labor used in the […]
• Marx’s Anticipation of the Nationalism and Imperialism of the Second Half of the 19th Century The process of civilization is nothing other than a typical and complete adoption or duplication of the injurious culture of the west.
• Karl Marx and George Shaw The paper will start with the basics of Marx’s theory in the book and relate them to its manifestations in Shaw’s play.
• Marx’s Theory on Exploitation-Critical Analysis According to Marx exploitation theory, the diversifications and intricacies of the need to amass economic power has led to a situation whereby some individuals or personalities take advantage of the labor/effort of other people and […]
• Karl Marx’s Theory of Alienation According to the theory of Karl Marx, alienation is aloss of the sense of existence in the process of working during the epoch of capitalism.
• Karl Marx: From Feudal Society to Modern Capitalism Due to this reasons, Karl Marx and his followers advocated for changes that would enable mass production for the benefit of the society which marks the step of major transformational from the feudalism to capitalism […]
• Karl Marx Ideologies and His Influence in the 21st Century Political system, education system as well as the family were organized according to the nature of the class that people belong to which reflects the economic base of the people and it serves to produce […]
• Social Science Theorist: Karl Marx According to Marx there are two major classes of people in a society; the ruling class and the subjects. Marx also used capitalism to define and study history and he concluded that all social conflicts […]
• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx Marx predicted the persistent demo of commoditization and additional escalating growth of the capitalist bazaar as one day pursuing the bourgeoisie above the facade of the world.
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Karl Marx: his philosophy explained

Tutor in Philosophy and Sociology, Deakin University

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Christopher Pollard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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In 1845, Karl Marx declared : “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.

Change it he did.

Political movements representing masses of new industrial workers, many inspired by his thought, reshaped the world in the 19th and 20th centuries through revolution and reform. His work influenced unions, labour parties and social democratic parties, and helped spark revolution via communist parties in Europe and beyond.

Around the world, “Marxist” governments were formed, who claimed to be committed to his principles, and who upheld dogmatic versions of his thought as part of their official doctrine.

Marx’s thought was groundbreaking. It came to stimulate arguments in every major language, in philosophy, history, politics and economics. It even helped to found the discipline of sociology.

Although his influence in the social sciences and humanities is not what it once was, his work continues to help theorists make sense of the complex social structures that shape our lives.

Read more: Explainer: the ideas of Foucault

Marx was writing when mid-Victorian capitalism was at its Dickensian worst, analysing how the new industrialism was causing radical social upheaval and severe urban poverty. Of his many writings, perhaps the most well known and influential are the rather large Capital Volume 1 (1867) and the very small Communist Manifesto (1848), penned with his collaborator Frederick Engels.

On economics alone, he made important observations that influenced our understanding of the role of boom/bust cycles, the link between market competition and rapid technological advances, and the tendency of markets towards concentration and monopolies.

Marx also made prescient observations regarding what we now call “ globalisation ”. He emphasised “the newly created connections […] of the world market” and the important role of international trade.

At the time, property owners held the vast majority of wealth, and their wealth rapidly accumulated through the creation of factories.

The labour of the workers – the property-less masses – was bought and sold like any other commodity. The workers toiled for starvation wages, as “appendages of the machine[s]”, in Marx’s famous phrase. By holding them in this position, the owners grew ever richer, siphoning off the value created by this labour.

This would inevitably lead to militant international political organisation in response.

It is from this we get Marx’s famous call in 1848, the year of Europe-wide revolutions:

workers of the world unite!

To do philosophy properly, Marx thought, we have to form theories that capture the concrete details of real people’s lives – to make theory fully grounded in practice.

His primary interest wasn’t simply capitalism. It was human existence and our potential.

His enduring philosophical contribution is an insightful, historically grounded perspective on human beings and industrial society.

Marx observed capitalism wasn’t only an economic system by which we produced food, clothing and shelter; it was also bound up with a system of social relations.

Work structured people’s lives and opportunities in different ways depending on their role in the production process: most people were either part of the “owning class” or “working class”. The interests of these classes were fundamentally opposed, which led inevitably to conflict between them.

On the basis of this, Marx predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism leading to equally inevitable working-class revolutions. However, he seriously underestimated capitalism’s adaptability. In particular, the way that parliamentary democracy and the welfare state could moderate the excesses and instabilities of the economic system.

Marx argued social change is driven by the tension created within an existing social order through technological and organisational innovations in production.

Technology-driven changes in production make new social forms possible, such that old social forms and classes become outmoded and displaced by new ones. Once, the dominant class were the land owning lords. But the new industrial system produced a new dominant class: the capitalists.

Against the philosophical trend to view human beings as simply organic machines, Marx saw us as a creative and productive type of being. Humanity uses these capacities to transform the natural world. However, in doing this we also, throughout history, transform ourselves in the process. This makes human life distinct from that of other animals.

The conditions under which people live deeply shape the way they see and understand the world. As Marx put it:

men make their own history [but] they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.

Marx viewed human history as process of people progressively overcoming impediments to self-understanding and freedom. These impediments can be mental, material and institutional. He believed philosophy could offer ways we might realise our human potential in the world.

Theories, he said, were not just about “interpreting the world”, but “changing it”.

Individuals and groups are situated in social contexts inherited from the past which limit what they can do – but these social contexts afford us certain possibilities.

The present political situation that confronts us and the scope for actions we might take to improve it, is the result of our being situated in our unique place and time in history.

This approach has influenced thinkers across traditions and continents to better understand the complexities of the social and political world, and to think more concretely about prospects for change.

On the basis of his historical approach, Marx argued inequality is not a natural fact; it is socially created. He sought to show how economic systems such as feudalism or capitalism – despite being hugely complex historical developments – were ultimately our own creations.

Read more: Explainer: Nietzsche, nihilism and reasons to be cheerful

Alienation and freedom

By seeing the economic system and what it produces as objective and independent of humanity, this system comes to dominate us. When systematic exploitation is viewed as a product of the “natural order”, humans are, from a philosophical perspective, “enslaved” by their own creation.

What we have produced comes to be viewed as alien to us. Marx called this process “alienation”.

Despite having intrinsic creative capacities, most of humanity experience themselves as stifled by the conditions in which they work and live. They are alienated a) in the production process (“what” is produced and “how”); b) from others (with whom they constantly compete); and c) from their own creative potential.

For Marx, human beings intrinsically strive toward freedom, and we are not really free unless we control our own destiny.

Marx believed a rational social order could realise our human capacities as individuals as well as collectively, overcoming political and economic inequalities.

Writing in a period before workers could even vote (as voting was restricted to landowning males) Marx argued “the full and free development of every individual” – along with meaningful participation in the decisions that shaped their lives – would be realised through the creation of a “classless society [of] the free and equal”.

Marx’s concept of ideology introduced an innovative way to critique how dominant beliefs and practices – commonly taken to be for the good of all – actually reflect the interests and reinforce the power of the “ruling” class.

For Marx, beliefs in philosophy, culture and economics often function to rationalise unfair advantages and privileges as “natural” when, in fact, the amount of change we see in history shows they are not.

He was not saying this is a conspiracy of the ruling class, where those in the dominant class believe things simply because they reinforce the present power structure.

Rather, it is because people are raised and learn how to think within a given social order. Through this, the views that seem eminently rational rather conveniently tend to uphold the distribution of power and wealth as they are.

Marx had always aspired to be a philosopher, but was unable to pursue it as a profession because his views were judged too radical for a university post in his native Prussia. Instead, he earned his living as a crusading journalist.

By any account, Marx was a giant of modern thought.

His influence was so far reaching that people are often unaware just how much his ideas have shaped their own thinking.

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Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5th, 1818 in the city of Trier, Germany to a comfortable middle-class Jewish family. His father, a lawyer and ardent supporter of Enlightenment liberalism, converted to Lutheranism when Marx was only a boy in order to save the family from the discrimination that Prussian Jews endured at the time. Marx enjoyed a broad, secular education under his father, and found an intellectual mentor in Freiherr Ludwig von Westphalen, a Prussian nobleman with whom Marx...

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Karl Marx Essays

Enumerating on the problems of capitalism without solutions anonymous college, communist manifesto.

Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei – the great collaborative work of Marx and Engels – is in its essence the propagandistic synopsis of the communist ideology as it stood, prefaced with a detailed and condemning account of human socioeconomic...

The Foundation of the Communist Movement Bradley Norman

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, has become one of the world's most influential and significant pieces of political propaganda ever written. It contains the viewpoints and ideology of the world-view that Marx and...

Marx and Freud: Human Happiness and Human Nature Donn M. Fresard

At the root of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud's differences regarding the nature of human happiness are their almost diametrically opposed models of human nature. Freud describes human nature in terms of universal, instinctive drives, the fulfillment...

The Communist Manifesto and the Industrial Proletariat Theresa Stout

Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto was most appealing to and revolutionary for the industrial workers of 1848 (and those to come after that time). The call for unification of the proletariat and abolishment of the Bourgeoisie was an urgent one during...

Marx: Idealism vs. Materialism Mark Weiner

Karl MarxÃÂÂs infamous statement that, ÃÂÂI am not a MarxistÃÂ? holds a profound truth deeply connected with his philosophy. It could be understood to mean that he disdained the hundreds of interpretations of his work following their publication....

Marx: Alienation, Unity, and Human Nature Anonymous

Differentiation, decomposition, alienation, estrangement: these words appear again and again in MarxÃÂÂs writings as descriptions of the failures of capitalism. For him, an emphasis on community and equality was the solution to the degrading...

Marxist Influences in Darwin's Origin of Species Chris Martin

Less than a decade after Karl Marx completed his philosophical work, The German Ideology: Part I, Charles Darwin was finally persuaded to publish his biological masterpiece, The Origin of Species. Could these two works be bound intrinsically...

Communism and the Need for Political Action Miroslav Ovcharik

As a young writer in a time of brewing class tensions, Marx studied the historical and present relationship between the classes and wrote several works, including "The German Ideology" (1845-46) and "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (1848). In...

Marx and Burke's Contrasting Views of Ideal Progress Laura Eidem

Edmund Burke and Karl Marx would have been mortified at each other's conception of acceptable progress and the movement of history. Such repugnance, in fact, was indeed expressed by Marx, reflecting the two polar views of his and Burke's...

Classical Views of Liberalism Anonymous

Classical liberalism, as expressed by Locke, contains the notions of both intellectual or physical liberty (i.e., the natural rights and freedoms of man with respect to society) and economic liberty (i.e., the right to own and transmit property)....

The Inevitable Revolution: Exploring Marx and Engel’s Promise Usman Mohammad Ali College

As the authors of The Communist Manifesto , Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are known as the initiators of communist and Marxist theories; many of their ideas are still at the heart of contemporary critiques of capitalism’s excesses. In their ...

Back to the Future? Sustainability and Futurism in the Communist Manifesto Anonymous College

"We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under...

The Alienation of the Proletariat: An Explanation and Critique of Marx's Theory of Estranged Labor Claudia Kelley College

In a colloquial context, a state of ‘alienation’ is one in which an individual is excluded or isolated from a group with whom that individual belongs or should be involved (Merriam-Webster, 2015). However, in the context of Marxist theory, ‘...

Karl Marx, Engels, and Babeuf Anonymous College

The Marxist communist ideology is possibly one of the most misunderstood political dogmas of modern times. It is a theory in which, through the historical events and practices of his time, Karl Marx had predicted the next steps towards communism...

Religion in Science for Darwin and Marx Anonymous 12th Grade

Both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin have proven themselves to be strong voices against the chorus in their respective fields, particularly in their quintessential works, The Communist Manifesto by Marx, and The Descent of Man by Darwin. Both writers...

The Human Pursuit of Happiness Jacob Bradley Steenrod College

A recurring theme throughout the novel, Civilization and Its Discontents, is the dogged mission of mankind attempting to achieve happiness, but always falling short. “Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains,...

Human Classification of Similarities and Differences Anonymous 12th Grade

Both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin used classification to enhance their ideas; human classification in particular. Marx classifies humans in a society as either part of the bourgeois or the proletariat while on the other hand, Darwin classifies...

Liberty Defined, and Re-defined “The Communist Manifesto” and “On Liberty” R A Williams College

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and first published in 1848 [1], precedes the writing of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty by more than a decade. Although Mill and Marx were both living in England by the time On...

Solution to Isolation: Marx, Cavell, and Descartes Anonymous College

Human beings are social in nature, depending upon one another in order to truly thrive. Modern life, however, seems to work against the conditions needed for humanity’s success, forcing members of society into alienation while under the illusion...

Alienation in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto Anonymous College

Alienation is a core aspect of Marxist thinking. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism is the cause alienation. The theory is that the estrangement, or alienation, of people, is a consequence of living in...

Conformity in the Kite Runner and the Communist Manifesto Anonymous 10th Grade

As psychologist Rollo May once said: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.” Throughout Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, the reader is exposed to the dueling themes of conformity versus nonconformity,...

The Reversal of Power: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein Anonymous College

As Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein delves deeper into his search for the causes of life, he becomes consumed by his quest for the answer to his question as he toils over his creation – a decrepit but mortal form compiled of...

The Bourgeoisie Built the Cave: An Application of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to Marxism Ailish Beveridge College

More than a thousand years ago, Plato wrote of a cave in which three prisoners were chained in such a position where they could only see the wall in front of them. This being their only perceived reality, they came to believe that the shadows they...

Ideal Societies of the Nineteenth Century Anonymous College

The 19th century was a period of turmoil and significant change. The century consisted of revolutions and various ideas of what philosophy should be used in an effort to alter the lives of people for the better. The century began in a time of...

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Essays on Karl Marx

Karl marx essay topics for college students.

As a college student, choosing the right essay topic is crucial for a successful and engaging assignment. This page is designed to help you explore various essay types and topics related to Karl Marx, allowing you to tap into your creativity and personal interests.

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Essay types and topics, argumentative essay.

• The impact of Karl Marx's ideas on modern society
• Marxism and its relevance in the 21st century

Paragraph Example: Karl Marx's revolutionary theories continue to shape our understanding of social and economic systems. In this essay, we will delve into the impact of his ideas on contemporary society, exploring the ongoing relevance of Marxism in the modern world.

Paragraph Example: In , Karl Marx's ideas have left an indelible mark on our social and economic structures. As we navigate the complexities of the 21st century, it is vital to consider the enduring impact of Marxism and its potential for shaping a more equitable future.

Compare and Contrast Essay

• Comparing the economic theories of Karl Marx and Adam Smith
• Contrasting Marx's views on class struggle with those of Max Weber

Descriptive Essay

• The life and impact of Karl Marx
• A day in the life of a worker in a Marxist society

Persuasive Essay

• Why Karl Marx's ideas are still relevant today
• Advocating for the implementation of Marxist principles in contemporary society

Narrative Essay

• My journey of understanding Karl Marx's theories
• A fictional account of life in a society based on Marxist principles

Engagement and Creativity

Essay writing is not just about meeting academic requirements; it is an opportunity to explore your interests, develop critical thinking skills, and express your unique perspective. I encourage you to choose a topic that resonates with you and approach it with creativity and curiosity.

Educational Value

Each essay type offers unique learning outcomes. Argumentative essays sharpen your analytical thinking, compare and contrast essays enhance your critical analysis skills, descriptive essays hone your ability to paint vivid pictures with words, persuasive essays strengthen your ability to present convincing arguments, and narrative essays allow you to master the art of storytelling.

The Life of Karl Marx and His Impact on The Society

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The Concept of Alienation in The Works of Karl Marx

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The Manifesto of The Communist Party - is The Start of Manifest Epoch

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A Look The Promise of Marx and Engel at The Inevitable Revolution

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Karl Marx was one of the greatest revolutionaries of the nineteenth century. He initiated the historical dimension to an understanding of society, culture and economics. He created the concept of ideology in the sense of beliefs that shape and control social actions, analyzed the fundamental nature of class as a mechanism of governance and social interaction. His thought and action, during the span of four decades, changed the course of history in Europe. While his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels accompanied Marx in his social adventures, Communism is identified with Marx alone.

Hence, its description as Marxism is widely accepted. Further, the basic thrust of Marxism is to reform and update socialism. In doing so, Marx borrowed certain concepts from his teacher and political philosopher, Hegel. Communism is also popularized as the scientific socialism.

Marxism had evoked prompt response in both the protagonists as well as antagonists of this ideology. In view of basing its arguments on the analysis of capitalism, Marxism appeared as its antidote, and aimed at establishing scientific socialism in any advanced capitalist state.

A thorough study of Marxism makes one believe that the capitalism would be replaced by socialism. For, the basic premises of Marxism are put forward, on a rational and logical format. And, as Marx observed, ‘the philosophers of the world have interpreted it in many ways, but the point, however, is to change it’.

Hence, the mission and goal of Marxism is to change the existing socio-economic order in any society, more so in the capitalist one. That, of course, is possible if the party based on the principles of Marxism is founded on and undertakes the task of a revolution. In other words, Marxism is not just a philosophy but also an action-oriented ideology.

Background :

Further, the fascinating thing about Marxism is that it decries all hitherto existing ide­ologies as false consciousness of social reality and offers an ideology of its own. Marx’s ideology begins with his criticism of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, wherein he denounced the significance of religious myths in understanding the reality of man’s life.

Marx carried his point further in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts wherein he observed that man is the sole object of ultimate value and that the distinctly human qual­ity is reason or consciousness. Later on, in his Thesis on Feuerbach, he emphasized the practical nature of thought and denied the importance of unpractical thinking. To him, it is the thought or consciousness that can change the world. And, the consciousness is governed by the conditions of objective reality. To quote Marx:

Man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life.

However, Marx criticized bourgeois ideology as false consciousness and also linked it up with the notion of class domination. In his perception, the German thinkers failed to realize the fundamental advance made by the materialist philosophy. Marx believed that the ideology is integrally connected with the interests of the ruling class.

Hence, the ideology of the bourgeoisie is the programme of the capitalistic expansion and power. Further, the system of ideas that tends to justify and further the aims of the ruling class is the predominant ideas of that age. For, the ruling class can control all the products, be they goods or ideas.

In other words, the main function of the ideology is justifica­tion, not explanation. Ideology supports class interests. The interest of a ruling class is the maintenance of its political and economic power. Hence, if the ideology of the ruling class is being used to spread false consciousness, the working class can develop its ideology and overthrow the ruling class in the proletarian revolution.

As part of praxis, the Marxist ideology, having been implemented in Russia, China and many countries quite successfully, dominated at least till the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite some setbacks, Marxist ideology certainly evokes positive attention even today. While its practitioners might have failed in comprehending its basic principles and in the application of it, the hopes it created in the vast masses the world over, particularly in the third world, are long lasting.

Meanwhile, there emerged many variants of Marxism, revised forms as per the conditions of different countries, which are also put to tests, every now and then. In any case, progressive ideologies are those that help the state and government in improving the living conditions of the people in a given society.

Related Articles:

• Marx’s Ideas on Dialectical Materialism
• Marx’s Theory of Historical Materialism

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Historical materialism

• Analysis of society
• Analysis of the economy
• Class struggle
• The contributions of Engels
• The work of Kautsky and Bernstein
• The radicals
• The Austrians
• The dictatorship of the proletariat
• Marxism in Cuba
• Marxism in the developing world
• Marxism in the West

Where did Marxism come from?

Why is marxism important, how is marxism different from other forms of socialism, how does marxism differ from leninism.

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Marxism originated in the thought of the radical philosopher and economist Karl Marx , with important contributions from his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels . Marx and Engels authored  The Communist Manifesto  (1848), a pamphlet outlining their theory of historical materialism and predicting the ultimate overthrow of capitalism by the industrial proletariat . Engels edited the second and third volumes of Marx’s analysis and critique of capitalism,  Das Kapital , both published after Marx’s death. 

In the mid-19th century, Marxism helped to consolidate, inspire, and radicalize elements of the labour and socialist movements in western Europe, and it was later the basis of Marxism-Leninism and Maoism , the revolutionary doctrines developed by Vladimir Lenin in Russia and Mao Zedong in China, respectively. It also inspired a more moderate form of socialism in Germany, the precursor of modern  social democracy .  

Under socialism , the means of production are owned or controlled by the state for the benefit of all, an arrangement that is compatible with democracy and a peaceful transition from capitalism . Marxism justifies and predicts the emergence of a stateless and classless society without private property. That vaguely socialist society, however, would be preceded by the violent seizure of the state and the means of production by the proletariat , who would rule in an interim dictatorship . 

Marxism predicted a spontaneous revolution by the proletariat , but Leninism insisted on the need for leadership by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries (such as Vladimir Lenin himself). Marxism predicted a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat , whereas Leninism, in practice, established a permanent dictatorship of the Communist Party . Marxism envisioned a revolution of proletarians in industrialized countries, while Leninism also emphasized the revolutionary potential of peasants in primarily agrarian societies (such as Russia).

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Marxism , a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology , a theory of history, and an economic and political program. There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements, particularly before 1914. Then there is Soviet Marxism as worked out by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and modified by Joseph Stalin , which under the name of Marxism-Leninism ( see Leninism ) became the doctrine of the communist parties set up after the Russian Revolution (1917). Offshoots of this included Marxism as interpreted by the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and his followers, Mao Zedong ’s Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and various Marxisms in the developing world. There were also the post-World War II nondogmatic Marxisms that have modified Marx’s thought with borrowings from modern philosophies, principally from those of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also from Sigmund Freud and others.

(Read Leon Trotsky’s 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)

The thought of Karl Marx

The written work of Marx cannot be reduced to a philosophy , much less to a philosophical system. The whole of his work is a radical critique of philosophy, especially of G.W.F. Hegel ’s idealist system and of the philosophies of the left and right post- Hegelians . It is not, however, a mere denial of those philosophies. Marx declared that philosophy must become reality. One could no longer be content with interpreting the world; one must be concerned with transforming it, which meant transforming both the world itself and human consciousness of it. This, in turn, required a critique of experience together with a critique of ideas. In fact, Marx believed that all knowledge involves a critique of ideas. He was not an empiricist . Rather, his work teems with concepts (appropriation, alienation , praxis, creative labour, value, and so on) that he had inherited from earlier philosophers and economists, including Hegel, Johann Fichte , Immanuel Kant , Adam Smith , David Ricardo , and John Stuart Mill . What uniquely characterizes the thought of Marx is that, instead of making abstract affirmations about a whole group of problems such as human nature , knowledge, and matter , he examines each problem in its dynamic relation to the others and, above all, tries to relate them to historical, social, political, and economic realities.

In 1859, in the preface to his Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie ( Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy ), Marx wrote that the hypothesis that had served him as the basis for his analysis of society could be briefly formulated as follows:

In the social production that men carry on, they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness . The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and intellectual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence; it is on the contrary their social existence which determines their consciousness.

Raised to the level of historical law, this hypothesis was subsequently called historical materialism. Marx applied it to capitalist society, both in Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848; The Communist Manifesto ) and Das Kapital (vol. 1, 1867; “Capital”) and in other writings. Although Marx reflected upon his working hypothesis for many years, he did not formulate it in a very exact manner: different expressions served him for identical realities. If one takes the text literally, social reality is structured in the following way:

1. Underlying everything as the real basis of society is the economic structure. This structure includes (a) the “material forces of production,” that is, the labour and means of production, and (b) the overall “relations of production,” or the social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution. Although Marx stated that there is a correspondence between the “material forces” of production and the indispensable “relations” of production, he never made himself clear on the nature of the correspondence, a fact that was to be the source of differing interpretations among his later followers.

2. Above the economic structure rises the superstructure, consisting of legal and political “forms of social consciousness” that correspond to the economic structure. Marx says nothing about the nature of this correspondence between ideological forms and economic structure, except that through the ideological forms individuals become conscious of the conflict within the economic structure between the material forces of production and the existing relations of production expressed in the legal property relations. In other words, “The sum total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the condition of society” and is at the base of society. “The social structure and the state issue continually from the life processes of definite individuals . . . as they are in reality , that is acting and materially producing.” The political relations that individuals establish among themselves are dependent on material production, as are the legal relations. This foundation of the social on the economic is not an incidental point: it colours Marx’s whole analysis. It is found in Das Kapital as well as in Die deutsche Ideologie (written 1845–46; The German Ideology ) and the Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844 ( Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ).

Karl Marx - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Karl Marx was a 19th-century philosopher, economist, and political theorist whose ideas have significantly influenced modern socialism and communism. Essays could delve into his major works, his critique of capitalism, or his impact on political movements, as well as discuss his legacy and relevance in modern economic and political discussions. We have collected a large number of free essay examples about Karl Marx you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Karl Marx Ideas of Capitalism and Communism

Karl Mar introduced a very thoughtful but controversial communism idea. He believed that social-economic structures influence the world's societal stages of history and revolution rather than reformation as the production cause in society. Moving from primitive society to the slavery principle (master vs. slave) to capitalism (factory owner vs. worker). Marx perceived that the last as well as greatest stage ought to be a classless society, one in which conflicts relating to class come to an end. This kind of […]

Capitalism According to Marx and Engel

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Selected Essays – Marx

Selected essays, translated by, h.j. stenning.

Essay Index Reprint Series

BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS, INC. FREEPORT, NEW YORK

First published 1926 reprinted 1968, library of congress catalog card number: 68-16955, printed in the united states of america.

The present volume consists of a translation of some of Karl Marx’s principal writings during the six years 1844-1850.

In 1843 Marx was twenty-five years old. He had just married, apparently on the strength of the modest salary he was to receive for editing, jointly with Arnold Ruge, a periodical called the  Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher  ( Franco-German Annuals ), the purpose of which was to promote the union of German philosophy with French social science. Only one double-number of this journal appeared in 1844. It contained Marx’s criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right and his exposition of the social significance of the Jewish question, in the form of a review of two works by Bruno Bauer.

Translations of both articles are given in this volume.

They possess a special interest for the Marxian student, as they exhibit the grafting of a materialist philosophy upon the idealist philosophy of Hegel, and show the employment of the Hegelian dialectic in the investigation of political and historical questions.

It was not long before Marx and Ruge became intellectually estranged, and the third essay, “The King of Prussia and Social Reform,” which appeared in the Paris socialist journal  Vorwärts , contains a severe polemic against Ruge. In the same organ Marx published an elaborate defence of Engels in particular and communists in general from the strictures of Karl Heinzen, a radical republican politician. In both essays Marx ranges over a wide field, and develops his own views upon economic, political and historical questions.

The essay on Proudhon emphasizes the special merits of that writer as a pioneer of economic criticism, and forms a counterweight to Marx’s devastating criticism of Proudhon in the “Poverty of Philosophy.” This piece and the sketch of French materialism are extracted from  Die Heilige Familie  ( The Holy Family ), a comprehensive work of satirical criticism, in which Marx and Engels (whose share in writing the book was a very small one), settled accounts with their philosophic conscience.

The critique of the views of M. Guizot upon the English and French middle-class revolutions appeared in the  Neue Rhenische Revue  ( New Rhenish Review ), a periodical which Marx and Engels edited from London in 1850.

A CRITICISM OF THE HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT ToC

As far as Germany is concerned the criticism of religion is practically completed, and the criticism of religion is the basis of all criticism.

The profane existence of error is threatened when its heavenly  oratio pro aris et focis [1]  has been refuted.

He who has only found a reflexion of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven where he looked for a superman, will no longer be willing to find only the semblance of himself, only the sub-human, where he seeks and ought to find his own reality.

The foundation of the criticism of religion is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion indeed is man’s self-consciousness and self-estimation while he has not found his feet in the universe. But Man is no  [12] abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the world of men, the State, society. This State, this society produces religion, which is an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopædic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic  Point d’honneur , its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being, inasmuch as the human being possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious misery is in one mouth the expression of real misery, and in another is a protestation against real misery. Religion is the moan of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the people, is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to abandon the illusions about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions.  [13] The criticism of religion therefore contains potentially the criticism of the Vale of Tears whose aureole is religion.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers which adorned the chain, not that man should wear his fetters denuded of fanciful embellishment, but that he should throw off the chain, and break the living flower.

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he thinks, acts, shapes his reality like the disillusioned man come to his senses, so that he revolves around himself, and thus around his real sun. Religion is but the illusory sun which revolves around man, so long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is therefore the task of history, once the  thither  side of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of the  hither  side.

The immediate task of philosophy, when enlisted in the service of history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy shape, now that it has been unmasked in its holy shape. Thus the criticism of heaven transforms itself into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of right, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

[14] The following essay—a contribution to this work—is in the first place joined not to the original, but to a copy, to the German philosophy of politics and of right, for no other reason than because it pertains to Germany.

If one should desire to strike a point of contact with the German  status quo , albeit in the only appropriate way, which is negatively, the result would ever remain an anachronism. Even the denial of our political present is already a dust-covered fact in the historical lumber room of modern nations. If I deny the powdered wig, I still have to deal with unpowdered wigs. If I deny the German conditions of 1843, I stand, according to French chronology, scarcely in the year 1789, let alone in the focus of the present.

German history flatters itself that it has a movement which no people in the historical heaven have either executed before or will execute after it. We have in point of fact shared in the restoration epoch of modern nations without participating in their revolutions.

We were restored, in the first place, because other nations dared to make a revolution, and, in the second place, because other nations suffered a counter revolution: in the first  [15] place, because our masters were afraid, and, in the second place, because they regained their courage.

Led by our shepherds, we suddenly found ourselves in the society of freedom on the day of its interment.

As a school which legitimates the baseness of to-day by the baseness of yesterday, a school which explains every cry of the serf against the knout as rebellious, once the knout becomes a prescriptive, a derivative, a historical knout, a school to which history only shows itself  a posteriori , like the God of Israel to his servant Moses, the historical juridical school would have invented German history, were it not itself an invention of German history.

On the other hand, good-humoured enthusiasts, Teutomaniacs by upbringing and freethinkers by reflexion, seek for our history of freedom beyond our history in the Teutonic primeval woods. But in what respect is our freedom history distinguished from the freedom history of the boar, if it is only to be found in the woods? Moreover, as one shouts into the wood, so one’s voice comes back in answer (“As the question, so the answer”). Therefore peace to the Teutonic primeval woods.

[16] But war to German conditions, at all events! They lie below the level of history, they are liable to all criticism, but they remain a subject for criticism just as the criminal who is below the level of humanity remains a subject for the executioner.

Grappling with them, criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is no anatomical knife, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it will not refute but destroy. For the spirit of the conditions has been refuted. In and for themselves they are no memorable objects, but existences as contemptible as they are despised. Criticism has already settled all accounts with this subject. It no longer figures as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.

What we have to do is to describe a series of social spheres, all exercising a somewhat sluggish pressure upon each other, a general state of inactive dejection, a limitation which recognizes itself as much as it misunderstands itself, squeezed within the framework of a governmental system, which, living on the conservation of all meannesses, is itself nothing less than meanness in government.

[17] What a spectacle! On the one hand, the infinitely ramified division of society into the most varied races, which confront each other with small antipathies, bad consciences, and brutal mediocrity, and precisely because of the ambiguous and suspicious positions which they occupy towards each other, such positions being devoid of all real distinctions although coupled with various formalities, are treated by their lords as existences on sufferance. And even more. The fact that they are ruled, governed, and owned they must acknowledge and confess as a favour of heaven! On the other hand, there are those rulers themselves whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number.

The criticism which addresses itself to this object is criticism in hand-to-hand fighting, and in hand-to-hand fighting, it is not a question of whether the opponent is a noble opponent, of equal birth, or an interesting opponent; it is a question of meeting him. It is thus imperative that the Germans should have no opportunity for self-deception and resignation. The real pressure must be made more oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace more disgraceful by publishing it.

[18] Every sphere of German society must be described as the  partie honteuse [2]  of German society, these petrified conditions must be made to dance by singing to them their own melody! The people must be taught to be startled at their own appearance, in order to implant courage into them.

And even for modern nations this struggle against the narrow-minded actuality of the German  status quo  cannot be without interest, for the German  status quo  represents the frank completion of the  ancien régime , and the  ancien régime  is the concealed defect of the modern State. The struggle against the German political present is the struggle against the past of modern nations, which are still vexed by the recollections of this past. For them it is instructive to see the  ancien régime , which enacted its tragedy with them, playing its comedy as the German revenant . Its history was tragic so long as it was the pre-existing power of the world, and freedom, on the other hand, a personal invasion, in a word, so long as it believed and was obliged to believe in its justification. So long as the  ancien régime  as the existing world order struggled with a  [19] nascent world, historical error was on its side, but not personal perversity. Its downfall was therefore tragic.

On the other hand, the present German régime, which is an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of the generally recognized axiom of the obsolescence of the  ancien régime , imagines that it believes in itself, and extorts from the world the same homage. If it believed in its own being, would it seek to hide it under the semblance of an alien being and look for its salvation in hypocrisy and sophistry? The modern  ancien régime  is merely the comedian of a world order whose real heroes are dead.

History is thorough, and passes through many phases when it bears an old figure to the grave. The last phase of a world historical figure is its comedy. The gods of Greece, once tragically wounded to death in the chained Prometheus of Æschylus, were fated to die a comic death in Lucian’s dialogues. Why does history take this course? In order that mankind may break away in a jolly mood from its past.

In the light of this historical foresight, the political powers of Germany are vindicated.  [20] As soon then as the modern politico-social reality is itself subjected to criticism, as soon, therefore, as criticism raises itself to the height of truly human problems, it either finds itself outside the German  status quo , or it would delve beneath the latter to find its object.

To take an example! The relation of industry, and of the world of wealth generally, to the political world is one of the chief problems of modern times. Under what form is this problem beginning to engage the attention of Germans? Under the form of protective tariffs, of the system of prohibition, of political economy. Teutomania has passed out of men and gone into matter, and thus one fine day we saw our cotton knights and iron heroes transformed into patriots. Thus in Germany we are beginning to recognize the sovereignty of monopoly at home, in order that it may be invested with sovereignty abroad. We are now beginning in Germany at the point where they are leaving off in France and England.

The old rotten condition, against which these countries are theoretically in revolt, and which they only tolerate as chains are borne, is greeted in Germany as the dawning of a  [21] splendid future, which as yet scarcely dares to translate itself from cunning [3]  theory into the most ruthless practice. Whereas the problem in France and England reads: Political economy or the rule of society over wealth, it reads in Germany: national economy or the rule of private property over nationality. Thus England and France are faced with the question of abolishing monopoly which has been carried to its highest point; in Germany the question is to carry monopoly to its highest point.

If, therefore, the total German development were not in advance of the political German development, a German could at the most take part in present-day problems only in the same way as a Russian can do so.

But if the individual is not bound by the ties of a nation, the entire nation is even less liberated by the emancipation of an individual. The Scythians made no advance towards Greek culture because Greece numbered a Scythian among her philosophers. Luckily we Germans are no Scythians.

As the old nations lived their previous  [22] history in imagination, in mythology, so we Germans live our history to come in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history. If, therefore, we criticize the  œuvres posthumes  of our ideal history, philosophy, instead of the  œuvres incomplètes  of our real history, our criticism occupies a position among the questions of which the present says:  that is the question . [4]  That which represents the decaying elements of practical life among the progressive nations with modern State conditions first of all becomes critical decay in the philosophical reflexion of these conditions in Germany, where the conditions themselves do not yet exist.

German juridical and political philosophy is the sole element of German history which stands  al pari  with the official modern present.

The German people must therefore strike this their dream history against their existing conditions, and subject to criticism not only these conditions, but at the same time their abstract continuation.

[23] Their future can neither be confined to the direct denial of their real nor to the direct enforcement of their ideal political and juridical conditions, for they possess the direct denial of their real conditions in their ideal conditions, and the direct enforcement of their ideal conditions they have almost outlived in the opinion of neighbouring nations. Consequently the practical political party in Germany properly demands the negation of philosophy. Its error consists not in the demand, but in sticking to the demand, which seriously it neither does nor can enforce. It believes it can accomplish this negation by turning its back on philosophy, the while its averted head utters a few irritable and banal phrases over it. Moreover, its horizon is so limited as to exclude philosophy from the realm of German actuality unless it imagines philosophy to be implied in German practice and in the theories subserving it. It urges the necessity for linking up with vital forces, but forgets that the real vital force of the German people has hitherto only pullulated under its skull.

In a word: you cannot abolish philosophy without putting it into practice. The same error, only with the factors reversed, is  [24] committed by the theoretical party, the political party which founds on philosophy.

The latter perceives in the present struggle only the critical struggle of philosophy with the German world; it does not suspect that all previous philosophy has itself been a part of this world, and is its complement, if an ideal one. While critical towards its opposing party, it behaves uncritically towards itself. It starts from the assumptions of philosophy, but either refuses to carry further the results yielded by philosophy, or claims as the direct outcome of philosophy results and demands which have been culled from another sphere.

We reserve to ourselves a more detailed examination of this party.

Its fundamental defect may be reduced to this: it believes it can enforce philosophy without abolishing it. The criticism of German juridical and political philosophy, which has received through Hegel its most consistent, most ample and most recent shape, is at once both the critical analysis of the modern State and of the actuality which is connected therewith, and in addition the decisive repudiation of the entire previous mode of the  [25] German political and juridical consciousness, whose principal and most universal expression, elevated to the level of a science, is speculative jurisprudence itself.

While, on the one hand, speculative jurisprudence, this abstract and exuberant thought-process of the modern State, is possible only in Germany, on the other hand, the German conception of the modern State, making abstraction of real men, was only possible because and in so far as the modern State itself makes abstraction of real men or only satisfies the whole of man in an imaginary manner.

Germans have thought in politics what other peoples have done. Germany was  their  theoretical conscience. The abstraction and arrogance of her thought always kept an even pace with the one-sidedness and stunted growth of her actuality. If, therefore, the  status quo  of the German civic community expresses the completion of the  ancien régime , the completion of the pile driven into the flesh of the modern State, the  status quo  of German political science expresses the inadequacy of the modern State, the decay that is set up in its flesh.

As a decisive counterpart of the previous  [26] mode of German political consciousness, the criticism of speculative jurisprudence does not run back upon itself, but assumes the shape of problems for whose solution there is only one means: practice.

The question arises: can Germany attain to a practice  à la hauteur de principes , [5]  that is, to a revolution which will not only raise her to the level of modern nations, but to the human level which will be the immediate future of these nations?

The weapon of criticism cannot in any case replace the criticism of weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force, but theory too becomes a material force as soon as it grasps weapons. Theory is capable of grasping weapons as soon as its argument becomes  ad hommine , and its argument becomes  ad hominem  as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the matter by its root. Now the root for mankind is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and therefore of its practical energy, is its outcome from the decisive and positive abolition of religion.

The criticism of religion ends with the  [27] doctrine that man is the supreme being for mankind, and therefore with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, servile, neglected, contemptible being, conditions which cannot be better described than by the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a projected dog tax: “Poor dogs; they want to treat you like men!”

Even historically, theoretical emancipation has a specifically practical significance for Germany. Germany’s revolutionary past is particularly theoretical, it is the Reformation. Then it was the monk, and now it is the philosopher in whose brain the revolution begins.

Luther vanquished servility based upon devotion, because he replaced it by servility based upon conviction. He shattered faith in authority, because he restored the authority of faith. He transformed parsons into laymen, because he transformed laymen into parsons. He liberated men from outward religiosity, because he made religiosity an inward affair of the heart. He emancipated the body from chains, because he laid chains upon the heart.

[28] But if Protestantism is not the true solution, it was the true formulation of the problem. The question was no longer a struggle between the layman and the parson external to him; it was a struggle with his own inner parson, his parsonic nature. And if the protestant transformation of German laymen into parsons emancipated the lay popes, the princes, together with their clergy, the privileged and the philistines, the philosophic transformation of the parsonic Germans into men will emancipate the people. But little as emancipation stops short of the princes, just as little will the secularization of property stop short of church robbery, which was chiefly set on foot by the hypocritical Prussians. Then the Peasants’ War, the most radical fact of German history, came to grief on the reef of theology. To-day, when theology itself has come to grief, the most servile fact of German history, our  status quo , will be shivered on the rock of philosophy.

The day before the Reformation, official Germany was the most abject vassal of Rome. The day before its revolution, it is the abject vassal of less than Rome, of Prussia and Austria, of country squires and philistines.

[29] Meanwhile there seems to be an important obstacle to a radical German revolution.

Revolutions in fact require a passive element, a material foundation.

Theory becomes realized among a people only in so far as it represents the realization of that people’s needs. Will the immense cleavage between the demands of the German intellect and the responses of German actuality now involve a similar cleavage of middle-class society from the State, and from itself? Will theoretical needs merge directly into practical needs? It is not enough that the ideas press towards realization; reality itself must stimulate to thinking.

But Germany did not pass through the middle stages of political emancipation simultaneously with the modern nations. Even the stages which she has overcome theoretically she has not reached practically.

How would she be able to clear with a  salto mortale  not only her own obstacles, but at the same time the obstacles of modern nations, obstacles which she must actually feel to mean a liberation to be striven for from her real obstacles? A radical revolution can only be the revolution of radical needs, whose preliminary conditions appear to be wholly lacking.

[30] Although Germany has only accompanied the development of nations with the abstract activity of thought, without taking an active part in the real struggles incident to this development, she has, on the other hand, shared in the suffering incident to this development, without sharing in its enjoyments, or their partial satisfaction. Abstract activity on the one side corresponds to abstract suffering on the other side.

Consequently, one fine day Germany will find herself at the level of European decay, before she has ever stood at the level of European emancipation. The phenomenon may be likened to a fetish-worshipper, who succumbs to the diseases of Christianity.

Looking upon German governments, we find that, owing to contemporary conditions, the situation of Germany, the standpoint of German culture and finally their own lucky instincts, they are driven to combine the civilized shortcomings of the modern State world, whose advantages we do not possess, with the barbarous shortcomings of the  ancien régime , which we enjoy in full measure, so that Germany is constantly obliged to participate, if not intelligently, at any rate unintelligently,  [31] in the State formations which lie beyond her  status quo .

Is there for example a country in the world which shares so naïvely in all the illusions of the constitutional community, without sharing in its realities, as does so-called constitutional Germany? Was it necessary to combine German governmental interference, the tortures of the censorship, with the tortures of the French September laws which presupposed freedom of the press? Just as one found the gods of all nations in the Roman pantheon, so will one find the flaws of all State forms in the Holy Roman German Empire. That this eclecticism will reach a point hitherto unsuspected is guaranteed in particular by the politico-æsthetic  gourmanderie  of a German king, who thinks he can play all the parts of monarchy, both of the feudal and the bureaucratic, both of the absolute and the constitutional, of the autocratic as of the democratic, if not in the person of his people, then in his own person, if not for the people, then for himself. Germany as the embodiment of the defect of the political present, constituted in her own world, will not be able to overthrow the specifically German obstacles without [32] overthrowing the general obstacles of the political present.

It is not the radical revolution which is a utopian dream for Germany, not the general human emancipation, but rather the partial, the merely political revolution, the revolution which leaves the pillars of the house standing. Upon what can a partial, a merely political revolution base itself? Upon the fact that a part of bourgeois society could emancipate itself and attain to general rulership, upon the fact that, by virtue of its special situation, a particular class could undertake the general emancipation of society. This class would liberate the whole of society, but only upon the assumption that the whole of society found itself in the situation of this class, and consequently possessed money and education, for instance, or could acquire them if it liked.

No class in bourgeois society can play this part without setting up a wave of enthusiasm in itself and among the masses, a wave of feeling wherein it would fraternize and commingle with society in general, and would feel and be recognized as society’s general representative, a wave of enthusiasm wherein its  [33] claims and rights would be in truth the claims and rights of society itself, wherein it would really be the social head and the social heart. Only in the name of the general rights of society can a particular class vindicate for itself the general rulership.

Revolutionary energy and intellectual self-confidence are not sufficient by themselves to enable a class to attain to this emancipatory position, and thereby exploit politically all social spheres in the interest of its own sphere. In order that the revolution of a people should coincide with the emancipation of a special class of bourgeois society, it is necessary for a class to stand out as a class representing the whole of society. Thus further involves, as its obverse side, the concentration of all the defects of society in another class, and this particular class must be the embodiment of the general social obstacles and impediments. A particular social sphere must be identical with the notorious crime of society as a whole, in such wise that the emancipation of this sphere would appear to be the general self-emancipation. In order that one class should be the class of emancipation  par excellence , another class must contrariwise be the class of  [34] manifest subjugation. The negative-general significance of the French nobility and the French clergy was the condition of the positive-general significance of the class of the bourgeoisie, which was immediately encroaching upon and confronting the former.

But in Germany every class lacks not only the consistency, the keenness, the courage, the ruthlessness, which might stamp it as the negative representative of society. It lacks equally that breadth of soul which would identify it, if only momentarily, with the popular soul, that quality of genius which animates material power until it becomes political power, that revolutionary boldness which hurls at the opponent the defiant words: I am nothing, and I have to be everything. But the stock-in-trade of German morality and honour, not only as regards individuals but also as regards classes, constitutes rather that modest species of egoism which brings into prominence its own limitations.

The relation of the various spheres of German society is therefore not dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the  [35] conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its part practise oppression. Even the moral self-esteem of the German middle class is only based on the consciousness of being the general representative of the philistine mediocrity of all the other classes.

Consequently it is not only the German kings who succeed to the throne  mal à propos , but it is every sphere of bourgeois society which experiences its defeat before it celebrates its victory, develops its own handicaps before it overcomes the handicaps which confront it, asserts its own narrow-minded nature before it can assert its generous nature, so that even the opportunity of playing a great part is always past before it actually existed, and each class, so soon as it embarks on a struggle with the class above it, becomes involved in a struggle with the class below it. Consequently, the princedom finds itself fighting the monarchy, the bureaucrat finds himself fighting the nobility, the bourgeois finds himself fighting them all, while the proletariat is already commencing to fight the bourgeois.

The middle class hardly dares to seize hold of the ideas of emancipation from its own  [36] standpoint before the development of social conditions and the progress of political theory declare this standpoint to be antiquated, or at least very problematical. In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany universal emancipation is the  conditio sine quâ non  of every partial emancipation. In France it is the reality, in Germany it is the impossibility of gradual emancipation which must bring forth entire freedom. In France every popular class is tinged with political idealism, and does not feel primarily as a particular class, but as the representative of social needs generally. The rôle of emancipator, therefore, flits from one class to another of the French people in a dramatic movement, until it eventually reaches the class which will no longer realize social freedom upon the basis of certain conditions lying outside of mankind and yet created by human society, but will rather organize all the conditions of human existence upon the basis of social freedom. In Germany, on the other hand, where practical life is as unintellectual as intellectual life is unpractical, no class of bourgeois society either feels the need or possesses the capacity for emancipation, unless  [37] driven thereto by its immediate position, by material necessity, by its chains themselves.

Wherein, therefore, lies the positive possibility of German emancipation?

Answer: In the formation of a class in radical chains, a class which finds itself in bourgeois society, but which is not of it, an order which shall break up all orders, a sphere which possesses a universal character by virtue of its universal suffering, which lays claim to no special right, because no particular wrong but wrong in general is committed upon it, which can no longer invoke a historical title, but only a human title, which stands not in a one-sided antagonism to the consequences, but in a many-sided antagonism to the assumptions of the German community, a sphere finally which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all the other spheres of society, which represents in a word the complete loss of mankind, and can therefore only redeem itself through the complete redemption of mankind. The dissolution of society reduced to a special order is the proletariat.

The proletariat arises in Germany only with the beginning of the industrial movement; for it is not poverty resulting from natural  [38] circumstances but poverty artificially created, not the masses who are held down by the weight of the social system, but the multitude released by the acute break-up of society—especially of the middle class—which gives rise to the proletariat. When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the existing order of things it is merely announcing the secret of its own existence, for it is in itself the virtual dissolution of this order of things. When the proletariat desires the negation of private property, it is merely elevating to a general principle of society what it already involuntarily embodies in itself as the negative product of society.

With respect to the nascent world the proletariat finds itself in the same position as the German king occupies with respect to the departed world, when he calls the people his people, just as he calls a horse his horse. In declaring the people to be his private property, the king acknowledges that private property is king.

Just as philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as soon as the lightning of thought has penetrated  [39] into the flaccid popular soil, the elevation of Germans into men will be accomplished.

Let us summarize the result at which we have arrived. The only liberation of Germany that is practical or possible is a liberation from the standpoint of the theory that declares man to be the supreme being of mankind. In Germany emancipation from the Middle Ages can only be effected by means of emancipation from the results of a partial freedom from the Middle Ages. In Germany no brand of serfdom can be extirpated without extirpating every kind of serfdom. Fundamental Germany cannot be revolutionized without a revolution in its basis. The emancipation of Germans is the emancipation of mankind. The head of this emancipation is philosophy; its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be realized without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot abolish itself without realizing philosophy.

When all the inner conditions are fulfilled, the German day of resurrection will be announced by the crowing of the Gallic Cock.

[2] Shameful part.

[3] listigen , a play on the name of the protectionist economist F. List.

[4] In English in the original.

[5] In conformity with principles.

ON THE JEWISH QUESTION

1. Bruno Bauer,  Die Judenfrage  ( The Jewish Question ), Brunswick 1843.

2. Bruno Bauer,  Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden ( The Capacity of Modern Jews and Christians to become free ), Zurich 1843.

1.  Bruno Bauer ,  Die Judenfrage , Brunswick 1843.

The German Jews crave for emancipation. What emancipation do they crave? Civic, political emancipation.

Bruno Bauer answers them: Nobody in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are unfree. How shall we liberate you? You Jews are egoists, if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. As Germans you ought to labour for the political emancipation of Germany, as men for human emancipation, and you ought to feel the special nature of your oppression and your disgrace not as an exception from the rule, but rather as its confirmation.

Or do Jews demand to be put on an equal  [41] footing with Christian subjects? Then they recognize the Christian State as justified, then they recognize the régime of general subjugation. Why are they displeased at their special yoke, when the general yoke pleases them? Why should Germans interest themselves in the emancipation of the Jews, if Jews do not interest themselves in the emancipation of Germans?

The Christian State knows only privileges. In that State the Jew possesses the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which a Christian has not. Why does he crave the rights which he has not, and which Christians enjoy?

If the Jew wants to be emancipated from the Christian State, then he should demand that the Christian State abandon its religious prejudice. Will the Jew abandon his religious prejudice? Has he therefore the right to demand of another this abdication of religion?

By its very nature the Christian State cannot emancipate the Jews; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated.

So long as the State is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, both are equally incapable of granting and receiving emancipation.

[42] The Christian State can only behave towards the Jew in the manner of a Christian State, that is in a privileged manner, by granting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but causing him to feel the pressure of the other separated spheres, and all the more onerously inasmuch as the Jew is in religious antagonism to the dominant religion. But the Jew also can only conduct himself towards the State in a Jewish fashion, that is as a stranger, by opposing his chimerical nationality to the real nationality, his illusory law to the real law, by imagining that his separation from humanity is justified, by abstaining on principle from all participation in the historical movement, by waiting on a future which has nothing in common with the general future of mankind, by regarding himself as a member of the Jewish people and the Jewish people as the chosen people.

Upon what grounds therefore do you Jews crave emancipation? On account of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the State religion. As citizens? There are no citizens in Germany. As men? You are as little men as He on whom you called.

After giving a criticism of the previous  [43] positions and solutions of the question, Bauer has freshly posited the question of Jewish emancipation. How, he asks, are they constituted, the Jew to be emancipated, and the Christian State which is to emancipate? He replies by a criticism of the Jewish religion, he analyses the religious antagonism between Judaism and Christianity, he explains the nature of the Christian State, and all this with boldness, acuteness, spirit, and thoroughness, in a style as precise as it is forcible and energetic.

How then does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result? The formulation of a question is its solution. The criticism of the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question.

The summary is therefore as follows:

We must emancipate ourselves before we are able to emancipate others.

The most rigid form of the antagonism between the Jew and the Christian is the religious antagonism. How is this antagonism resolved? By making it impossible. How is a religious antagonism made impossible? By abolishing religion.

As soon as Jew and Christian recognize  [44] their respective religions as different stages in the development of the human mind, as different snake skins which history has cast off, and men as the snakes encased therein, they stand no longer in a religious relationship, but in a critical, a scientific, a human one. Science then constitutes their unity. Antagonisms in science, however, are resolved by science itself.

The German Jew is particularly affected by the lack of political emancipation in general and the pronounced Christianity of the State. In Bauer’s sense, however, the Jewish question has a general significance independent of the specific German conditions.

It is the question of the relation of religion to the State, of the contradiction between religious entanglement and political emancipation. Emancipation from religion is posited as a condition, both for the Jews, who desire to be politically emancipated, and for the State, which shall emancipate and itself be emancipated.

“Good, you say, and the Jew says so too, the Jew also is not to be emancipated as Jew, not because he is a Jew, not because he has such an excellent, general, human principle of  [45] morality; the Jew will rather retire behind the citizen and be a citizen, although he is a Jew and wants to remain one: that is, he is and remains a Jew, in spite of the fact that he is a citizen and lives in general human relationships: his Jewish and limited nature always and eventually triumphs over his human and political obligations. The prejudice remains in spite of the fact that it has been outstripped by general principles. If, however, it remains, it rather outstrips everything else.” “Only sophistically and to outward seeming would the Jew be able to remain a Jew in civic life; if he desired to remain a Jew, the mere semblance would therefore be the essential thing and would triumph, that is, his life in the State would be only a semblance or a passing exception to the rule and the nature of things” (“The Capacity of modern Jews and Christians to become free,” p. 57).

Let us see, on the other hand, how Bauer describes the task of the State: “France has recently (proceedings of the Chamber of Deputies, 26th December 1840) in connection with the Jewish question—as constantly in all other political questions—given us a glimpse of a life which is free, but revokes its freedom  [46] in law, and therefore asserts it to be a sham, and on the other hand contradicts its free law by its act.” “The Jewish Question,” p. 64.

“General freedom is not yet legal in France, the Jewish question is not yet solved, because legal freedom—that all citizens are equal—is limited in practice, which is still dominated by religious privileges, and this unfreedom in practice reacts on the law, compelling the latter to sanction the division of nominally free citizens into oppressed and oppressor,” p. 65.

When, therefore, would the Jewish problem be solved for France?

“The Jew, for instance, must cease to be a Jew if he will not allow himself to be hindered by his law from fulfilling his duties towards the State and his fellow-citizens, going, for example, to the Chamber of Deputies on the Sabbath and taking part in the public sittings. Every religious privilege, and consequently the monopoly of a privileged Church, must be surrendered, and if few or many or even the great majority believe they ought still to perform religious duties, this performance must be left to themselves as a private matter,” p. 65. “When there is no longer a privileged  [47] religion, there will no longer be a religion. Take from religion its excommunicating power, and it exists no longer,” p. 66.

On the one hand, Bauer states that the Jew must abandon Judaism, and that man must abandon religion, in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand, he feels he is logical in interpreting the political abolition of religion to mean the abolition of religion altogether. The State, which presupposes religion, is as yet no true, no real State. “At any rate the religious idea gives the State guarantees. But what State? What kind of State?” p. 97.

At this point we are brought up against the one-sided conception of the Jewish question.

It was by no means sufficient to inquire: Who shall emancipate? Who shall be emancipated? Criticism had a third task to perform.

It had to ask: what kind of emancipation are we concerned with? Upon what conditions is the desired emancipation based? The criticism of political emancipation itself was only the eventual criticism of the Jewish question and its true solution, in the “general question of the time.”

[48] Because Bauer does not raise the question to this level he falls into contradictions. He posits conditions which are not involved in the nature of political emancipation itself. He suggests questions which his problem does not imply, and he solves problems which leave his questions unsettled. Whereas Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation: “Their mistake was that they assumed the Christian State to be the only real State, and did not subject it to the same criticism that they applied to Judaism,” we find Bauer’s mistake to consist in the fact that it is only the Christian State, and not the “general State,” that he subjects to criticism, that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation, and consequently lays down conditions which are only explicable from an uncritical confusion of political emancipation with general human emancipation.

When Bauer asks Jews: Have you the right from your standpoint to crave political emancipation? we would inquire on the contrary: Has the standpoint of political emancipation the right to demand of Jews the abolition of Judaism, or from men generally the abolition of religion?

[49] The complexion of the Jewish question changes according to the State in which Jews find themselves. In Germany, where no political State, no State as State exists, the Jewish question is a purely theological question. The Jew finds himself in religious antagonism to the State, which acknowledges Christianity as its basis. This State is theologian  ex professo . Here criticism is criticism of theology, is two-edged criticism, criticism of Christian and criticism of Jewish theology. But however critical we may be, we cannot get out of the theological circle.

In France, in the constitutional State, the Jewish question is the question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political emancipation. As the semblance of a State religion is there preserved, although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, in the formula of a religion of the majority, the relationship of Jews to the State retains the semblance of a religious and theological antagonism.

It is only in the North American Free States—at least in part of them—that the Jewish question loses its theological significance and becomes a really secular question.  [50] Only where the political State exists in its completeness can the relation of the Jew, of the religious man generally, to the political State, and therefore the relation of religion to the State, be studied in its special features and its purity. The criticism of this relationship ceases to be theological criticism when the State ceases to adopt a theological attitude towards religion, when its attitude towards religion becomes purely political. The criticism then becomes criticism of the political State. At this point, where the question ceases to be theological, Bauer’s criticism ceases to be critical. In the United States there is neither a State religion nor a religion declared to be that of the majority, nor the predominance of one cult over another. The State is alien to all cults. ( Marie ou l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis , etc., by G. Beaumont, Paris 1835, p. 214.) There are even North American States where “the constitution does not impose religious beliefs or the practice of a cult as a condition of political privileges” (l. c. p. 225). Yet “nobody in the United States believes that a man without religion might be an honest man” (l. c. p. 224). Yet North America is pre-eminently the country of  [51] religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville and the Englishman Hamilton assure us with one voice. Meanwhile, the North American States only serve us as an example. The question is: What is the attitude of completed political emancipation towards religion? If even in the country of completed political emancipation we find religion not only existing, but in a fresh and vital state, it proves that the existence of religion does not contradict the completeness of the State. But as the existence of religion indicates the presence of a defect, the source of this defect may only be looked for in the nature of the State. We are no longer concerned with religion as the basis, but only as the phenomenon of secular shortcomings. Consequently we explain the religious handicap of the free citizens from their secular handicap. We do not assert that they must remove their religious handicap as soon as they cast off their secular fetters. We do not transform secular questions into theological questions. We transform theological questions into secular questions.

After history has for so long been dissolved in superstition, we dissolve the superstition in history. The question of the relation of  [52] political emancipation becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political State by criticizing the political State in its secular construction, apart from the religious weaknesses. We transmute the contradiction of the State with a specific religion, like Judaism, into the contradiction of the State with specific secular elements, and the contradiction of the State with religion generally into the contradiction of the State with its general assumptions.

The political emancipation of the Jew, of the Christian, of the religious man in general, means the emancipation of the State from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion generally. In its form as State, in the manner peculiar to its nature, the State emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from the State religion, that is, by the State as State acknowledging no religion.

Political emancipation from religion is not a thorough-going and consistent emancipation from religion, because political emancipation is not effectual and consistent human emancipation.

[53] The limit of political emancipation is immediately seen to consist in the fact that the State can cast off a fetter without men really becoming free from it, that the State can become a free State without men becoming free men. Bauer tacitly assents to this in laying down the following condition for political emancipation. “Every religious privilege, and therefore the monopoly of a privileged Church must be surrendered, and if few or many or even the great majority believe they ought still to perform religious duties, this performance must be left to themselves as a private matter.” The State may therefore achieve emancipation from religion, although the great majority are still religious. And the great majority do not cease to be religious by being religious privately.

The political elevation of the individual above religion shares all the defects and all the advantages of political elevation generally. For example, the State as State annuls private property, the individual declares in a political manner that private property is abolished as soon as he abolishes the census for active and passive eligibility, which has been done in many North American States. Hamilton  [54] interprets this fact quite correctly from the political standpoint: “The great multitude has won the victory over the property owners and the monied men.” Is not private property ideally abolished when the have-nots become the legislators of the haves? The census is the last political form to recognize private property.

Yet private property is not only not abolished with the political annulment of private property, but is even implied therein. The State abolishes in its fashion the distinctions of birth, status, education, and occupation when it declares birth, status, education, and occupation to be unpolitical distinctions, when, without taking account of these distinctions, it calls upon every member of the community to participate in the popular sovereignty on an equal footing, when it deals with all the elements of the real popular life from the State’s point of view. Nevertheless the State leaves private property, education, occupation operating in their own manner, that is, as education, as occupation, and developing their potentialities.

From abolishing these actual distinctions, it rather exists only upon their basis, and is conscious of being a political State and  [55] enforcing its communal principle only in opposition to these its elements. Consequently Hegel defines the relation of the political State to religion quite correctly when he says: “If the State is to have reality as the ethical, self-conscious realization of spirit, it must be distinguished from the form of authority and faith. But this distinction arises only in so far as the ecclesiastical side is in itself divided into several churches. Then only is the State seen to be superior to them, and wins and brings into existence the universality of thought as the principle of its form.” (“Philosophy of Right,” Eng. tr. p. 270.)

By its nature the completed political State is the generic life of man in contradistinction to his material life. All the assumptions of this egoistic life remain in existence outside the sphere of the State, in bourgeois society, but as the peculiarities of bourgeois society.

Where the political State has attained its true development, the individual leads not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, a double life, a heavenly and an earthly life, a life in the political community, wherein he counts as a member of the community, and a life in bourgeois society, wherein he is active  [56] as a private person, regarding other men as a means, degrading himself into a means and becoming a plaything of alien powers.

The political State is related to bourgeois society as spiritualistically as heaven is to earth. It occupies the same position of antagonism towards bourgeois society; it subdues the latter just as religion overcomes the limitations of the profane world, that is, by recognizing bourgeois society and allowing the latter to dominate it. Man in his outermost reality, in bourgeois society, is a profane being. Here, where he is a real individual for himself and others, he is an untrue phenomenon.

In the State, on the other hand, where the individual is a generic being, he is the imaginary member of an imagined sovereignty, he is robbed of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.

The conflict in which the individual as the professor of a particular religion is involved with his citizenship, with other individuals as members of the community, reduces itself to the secular cleavage between the political State and bourgeois society.

For the individual as a bourgeois, “life in the State is only a semblance, or a passing  [57] exception to the rule and the nature of things.” In any case, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only sophistically in political life, just as the citizen remains a Jew or a bourgeois only sophistically; but this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political State itself. The difference between the religious individual and the citizen is the difference between the merchant and the citizen, between the labourer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious individual is involved with the political individual is the same contradiction in which the bourgeois is involved with the citizen, in which the member of bourgeois society is involved with his political lionskin.

This secular conflict to which the Jewish question is finally reduced, the relation of the political State to its fundamental conditions, whether the latter be material elements, like private property, etc., or spiritual elements, like education or religion, the conflict between the general interest and the private interest, the cleavage between the political State and bourgeois society—these  [58] secular antagonisms are left unnoticed by Bauer, while he controverts their religious expression. “It is precisely its foundation, the need which assures to bourgeois society its existence and guarantees its necessity, which exposes its existence to constant dangers, maintains in it an uncertain element and converts the latter into a constantly changing mixture of poverty and wealth, distress and prosperity,” p. 8.

Bourgeois society in its antagonism to the political State is recognized as necessary, because the political State is recognized as necessary.

Political emancipation at least represents important progress; while not the last form of human emancipation generally, it is the last form of human emancipation within the existing world order. It is understood that we are speaking here of real, of practical emancipation.

The individual emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from public right into private right. It is no longer the spirit of the State, where the individual—although in a limited manner, under a particular form and in a special sphere—behaves  [59] as a generic being, in conjunction with other individuals; it has become the spirit of bourgeois society, of the sphere of egoism, of the  bellum omnium contra omnes . [6]  It is no longer the essence of the community, but the essence of social distinctions.

It has become the expression of the separation of the individual from his community, from himself and from other individuals—what it was originally. It is only the abstract profession of special perversity, of private whim. The infinite splitting-up of religion in North America, for example, gives it outwardly the form of a purely individual concern. It has been added to the heap of private interests, and exiled from the community as community. But there is no misunderstanding about the limits of political emancipation. The division of the individual into a public and a private individual, the expulsion of religion from the State into bourgeois society, is not a step, it is the completion of political emancipation, which thus neither abolishes nor seeks to abolish the real religiosity of the individual.

The splitting-up of the individual into Jew and citizen, into Protestant and citizen, into a  [60] religious person and citizen, this decomposition does not belie citizenship; it is not a circumvention of political emancipation; it is political emancipation itself, it is the political manner of becoming emancipated from religion. Moreover, in times when the political State as a political State is forcibly born of bourgeois society, when human self-liberation strives to realize itself under the form of political self-liberation, the State is driven the whole length of abolishing, of destroying religion, but it also proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the law of maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it proceeds to the abolition of life, to the guillotine. In the moment of its heightened consciousness, the political life seeks to suppress its fundamental conditions, bourgeois society and its elements, and to constitute itself as the real and uncontradictory generic life of the individual. It is, however, only enabled to do this by a flagrant violation of its own conditions of life, by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and the political drama therefore ends as inevitably with the restoration of religion, of private property, and all the elements of bourgeois society, as war ends with peace.

[61] Why not even the so-called Christian State, which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the State religion, and therefore adopts a proscriptive attitude towards other religions is the completed Christian State. The latter is rather the atheistic State, the democratic State, the State which consigns religion among the other elements of bourgeois society. The State which is still theological and which still officially prescribes belief in Christianity, has not yet succeeded in giving secular and human expression to those human foundations whose exaggerated expression is Christianity. The so-called Christian State is simply no State at all, because it is not Christianity as a religion, but only the human background of the Christian religion which can realize itself in actual human creations.

The so-called Christian State is the Christian denial of the State, although it is not by any means the political realization of Christianity. The State, which still professes Christianity in the form of religion, does not yet profess it in the form of the State, for its attitude towards religion is a religious attitude. It is not yet the actual realization of the human basis of religion, because it still operates upon the  [62] unreality, upon the imaginary shape of this human kernel. The so-called Christian State is the incomplete State, and the Christian religion is regarded by it as the complement and the redemption of its imperfection. Consequently religion becomes its instrument, and it is the State of hypocrisy. The so-called Christian State needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a State. The democratic State, the real State, does not need religion for its political completion. It can rather do without religion, because it represents the realization of the human basis of religion in a secular manner. The so-called Christian State, on the other hand, adopts a political attitude towards religion and a religious attitude towards politics. If it degrades the State form to the level of a fiction, it equally degrades religion to a fiction.

In order to elucidate these antagonisms, let us consider Bauer’s construction of the Christian State, a construction which has proceeded from contemplating the Christian-Germanic State.

Says Bauer: “In order to demonstrate the impossibility or the non-existence of a Christian State, we are frequently referred to  [63] that pronouncement in the Gospel which it not only does not follow, but cannot follow without dissolving itself completely as a State.” “But the question is not settled so easily. What then does this Gospel text enjoin? Supernatural self-denial, subjection to the authority of revelation, the turning away from the State, the abolition of secular conditions. Now all this is enjoined and carried out by the Christian State. It has absorbed the spirit of the Gospel, and if it does not repeat it in the same words as the Gospel expresses it, the reason is only because it expresses this spirit in the State form, that is, in forms which are indeed derived from the State of this world, but which are degraded to a sham in the religious rebirth which they have to undergo.”

Bauer goes on to show how the people of the Christian State are only a sham people, who no longer have any will of their own, but possess their real existence in the chief to whom they are subject, but from whom they were originally and naturally alien, as he was given to them by God; how the laws of this people are not their creation, but positive revelations; how their chief requires privileged mediators with his own people, with the  [64] masses; how these masses themselves are split up into a multitude of special circles, which are formed and determined by chance, which are distinguished by their interests, their particular passions and prejudices, and receive as a privilege permission to make mutual compacts (p. 56).

The separation of the “spirit of the Gospel” from the “letter of the Gospel” is an irreligious act. The State, which makes the Gospel speak in the letter of politics, in other letters than those of the Holy Spirit, commits a sacrilege if not in human eyes, at least in its own religious eyes. The State, which acknowledges Christianity as its supreme embodiment and the Bible as its charter, must be confronted with the words of Holy Writ, for the writings are sacred to the letter. The State lapses into a painful, and from the standpoint of the religious consciousness, irresolvable contradiction, when it is pinned down to that pronouncement of the Gospel, which it “not only does not follow, but cannot follow without completely dissolving itself as a State.” And why does it not want to completely dissolve itself? To this question it can find no answer, either for itself or for others. In its own  [65] consciousness the official Christian State is an Ought, which is impossible of realization. Only by lies can it persuade itself of the reality of its existence, and consequently it always remains for itself an object of doubt, an unreliable and ambiguous object. The critic is therefore quite justified in forcing the State, which appeals to the Bible, into a condition of mental derangement where it no longer knows whether it is a phantasm or a reality, where the infamy of its secular objects, for which religion serves as a mantle, falls into irresolvable conflict with the integrity of its religious consciousness, to which religion appears as the object of the world. This State can only redeem itself from its inner torment by becoming the hangman of the Catholic Church. As against the latter, which declares the secular power to be its serving body, the State is impotent. Impotent is the secular power which claimed to be the rule of the religious spirit.

In the so-called Christian State it is true that alienation counts, but not the individual. The only individual who counts, the king, is a being specially distinguished from other individuals, who is also religious and directly  [66] connected with heaven, with God. The relations which here prevail are still relations of faith. The religious spirit is therefore not yet really secularized.

Moreover, the religious spirit cannot be really secularized, for what in fact is it but the unworldly form of a stage in the development of the human mind? The religious spirit can only be realized in so far as the stage of development of the human mind, whose religious expression it is, emerges and constitutes itself in its secular form. This is what happens in the democratic State. It is not Christianity, but the human basis of Christianity which is the basis of this State. Religion remains the ideal, unworldly consciousness of its members, because it is the ideal form of the human stage of development which it represents.

The members of the political State are religious by virtue of the dualism between the individual life and the generic life, between the life of bourgeois society and the political life; they are religious inasmuch as the individual regards as his true life the political life beyond his real individuality, in so far as religion is here the spirit of bourgeois society,  [67] the expression of the separation and the alienation of man from man. The political democracy is Christian to the extent that it regards every individual as the sovereign, the supreme being, but it means the individual in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, the individual in his fortuitous existence, the individual just as he is, the individual as he is destroyed, lost, and alienated through the whole organization of our society, as he is given under the dominance of inhuman conditions and elements, in a word, the individual who is not yet a real generic being.

The sovereignty of the individual, as an alien being distinguished from the real individual, which is the chimera, the dream, and the postulate of Christianity, is under democracy sensual reality, the present, and the secular maximum.

The religious and theological consciousness itself is heightened and accentuated under a completed democracy, because it is apparently without political significance, without earthly aims, an affair of misanthropic feeling, the expression of narrow-mindedness, the product of caprice, because it is a really other-worldly life. Here Christianity achieves the practical  [68] expression of its universal religious significance, in that the most various philosophies are marshalled in the form of Christianity, and, what is more, other members of society are not required to subscribe to Christianity, but to some kind of religion. The religious consciousness riots in the wealth of religious antagonism and of religious variety.

We have therefore shown: Political emancipation from religion leaves religion in existence, although not as a privileged religion. The contradiction in which the supporter of a particular religion finds himself involved with his citizenship, is only a part of the general secular contradiction between the political State and bourgeois society. The completion of the Christian State is the State which professes to be a State and abstracts from the religion of its members. The emancipation of the State from religion is not the emancipation of the real individual from religion.

We do not therefore tell the Jews with Bauer: You cannot be politically emancipated without radically emancipating yourselves from Judaism. We tell them rather: Because you could be emancipated politically without entirely breaking away from Judaism, political [69] emancipation is not human emancipation. If you Jews desire to be politically emancipated without emancipating yourselves humanly, the incompleteness, the contradiction, lies not only in you, but it also resides in the essence and the category of political emancipation. If you remain enmeshed in this category, you share in a general disability.

But if the individual, although a Jew, can be politically emancipated and receive civic rights, can he claim and receive the so-called rights of man? Bauer denies it: “The question is whether the Jew as such, that is the Jew who admits that by his very nature he is compelled to live in everlasting separation from others, is capable of receiving and conceding to others the general rights of man.”

“The idea of the rights of man was first discovered in the last century so far as the Christian world is concerned. It is not innate in the individual, it is rather conquered in the struggle with the historical traditions in which the individual has hitherto been brought up. Thus the rights of man are not a gift from Nature, not a legacy from past history, but the price of the struggle against the accident of birth and against the privileges which history  [70] has bequeathed from generation to generation up to now. They are the result of education, and can only be possessed by those who have acquired and earned them.”

“Can they really be claimed by the Jew? So long as he is a Jew, the limiting quality which makes him a Jew must triumph over the human quality which binds him as a man to other men, and must separate him from gentiles. By this separation he proclaims that the special quality which makes him a Jew is his real supreme quality, to which the human quality must give place.”

“In the same manner the Christian as Christian cannot grant the rights of man,” pp. 19, 20.

According to Bauer, the individual must sacrifice the “privilege of faith” in order to be able to receive the general rights of man. Let us consider for a moment the so-called rights of man, in fact the rights of man in their authentic shape, in the shape which they possess among their discoverers, the North Americans and the French. In part these rights of man are political rights, rights which are only exercised in the community with others. Participation in the affairs of the  [71] community, in fact of the political community, forms their substance. They come within the category of political freedom, of civil rights, which does not, as we have seen, by any means presuppose the unequivocal and positive abolition of religion, and therefore of Judaism. It remains to consider the other aspect of human rights, the  droits de l’homme  apart from the  droits du citoyen .

Among them is to be found liberty of conscience, the right to practise any cult to one’s liking. The privilege of belief is expressly recognized, either as a human right or as the consequence of a human right, of freedom.

Declaration of the rights of man and of citizenship, 1791, article 10 : [7]   No penalty should attach to the holding of religious opinions. The right of every man to practise the religious cult to which he is attached is guaranteed by clause 1 of the Constitution of 1791.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, includes among human rights, article 7 :  The free practice of cults. With respect to the right to publish ideas and opinions and to  [72] assemble for the practice of a cult, it is even stated: The necessity for enunciating these rights presupposes either the presence or the recent memory of a despotism.

Constitution of Pennsylvania, article 9, paragraph 3 :  All men have received from Nature the imprescriptible right to worship the Almighty according to the dictates of their conscience, and nobody may legally be constrained to follow, to institute, or to support, against his will, any religious cult or ministry. In no case may any human authority interfere in questions of conscience and control the prerogatives of the soul.

Constitution of New Hampshire, articles 5 and 6 :  Among the number of natural rights, some are inalienable by their nature, because nothing can take their place. Such are the rights of conscience.

The incompatibility of religion with the rights of man is thus not implied by the conception of the rights of man, because the right to be religious, to be religious according to one’s liking, to practise the cult of a particular religion, is expressly included among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a general right of man.

The rights of man as such are distinguished  [73] from the rights of the citizen. What is man apart from the citizen? Nothing else than a member of bourgeois society. Why is the member of bourgeois society called “man,” and why are his rights called the rights of man? How do we explain this fact? From the relation of the political State to bourgeois society, from the meaning of political emancipation.

Above all we must record the fact that the so-called rights of man, as distinguished from the rights of the citizen, are nothing else than the rights of the member of bourgeois society, that is of the egoistic individual, of man separated from man and the community. The most radical constitution, the Constitution of 1793, may be cited:

Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen. Article 2. These rights, etc. (natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property.

Of what consists liberty?  Article 6. Liberty is the power which belongs to man to do everything which does not injure the rights of others.

Freedom is therefore the right to do and perform that which injures none. The limits within which each may move without injuring others are fixed by the law, as the boundary  [74] between two fields is fixed by the fence. The freedom in question is the freedom of the individual as an isolated atom thrown back upon itself. Why, according to Bauer, is the Jew incapable of receiving the rights of man? “So long as he is a Jew, the limiting quality which makes him a Jew must triumph over the human quality which binds him as a man to other men, and must separate him from gentiles.” But the right of man to freedom is not based upon the connection of man with man, but rather on the separation of man from man. It is the right to this separation, the right of the individual limited to himself.

The practical application of the right of man to freedom is the right of man to private property.

In what consists the right of man to private property?

Article 16 (Const. of 1793): The right to property is the right of every citizen to enjoy and dispose of as he likes his goods, his income, the fruit of his toil and of his industry.

The right of man to private property is therefore the right to enjoy and dispose of his property, at his will and pleasure, without regard for others, and independently of society:  [75] the right of self-interest. Each particular individual freedom exercised in this way forms the basis of bourgeois society. It leaves every man to find in other men not the realization, but rather the limits of his freedom. But it proclaims above all the right of man to enjoy and dispose of his property, his income, and the fruit of his toil and his industry according to his pleasure.

There still remain the other rights of man, equality and security.

Equality here in its non-political significance is nothing but the equality of the above described liberty, viz.: every individual is regarded as a uniform atom resting on its own bottom. Article 5 of the  Constitution of 1793  states:  Equality consists in the fact that the law is the same for all, whether it protects or whether it punishes.

And security?  Article 8 of the Constitution of 1793 :  Security consists in the protection accorded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property.

Security is the supreme social conception of bourgeois society, the conception of the police, the idea that society as a whole only exists to  [76] guarantee to each of its members the maintenance of his person, his rights, and his property.

By the conception of security bourgeois society does not raise itself above its egoism. Security is rather the confirmation of its egoism.

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, goes beyond the egoistic individual, beyond the individual as a member of bourgeois society, withdrawn into his private interests and separated from the community. Far from regarding the individual as a generic being, the generic life, Society itself, rather appears as an external frame for the individual, as a limitation of his original independence. The sole bond which connects him with his fellows is natural necessity, material needs and private interest, the preservation of his property and his egoistic person.

It is strange that a people who were just beginning to free themselves, to break down all the barriers between the various members of the community, to establish a political community, that such a people should solemnly proclaim the justification of the egoistic individual, separated from his fellows and from the community, and should even repeat this  [77] declaration at a moment when the most heroic sacrifice could alone save the nation and was therefore urgently required, at a moment when the sacrifice of all interests of bourgeois society was imperative, and egoism should have been punished as a crime. This fact is even stranger when we behold the political liberators degrading citizenship and the political community to the level of a mere means for the maintenance of these so-called rights of man, proclaiming the citizen to be the servant of the egoistic man, degrading the sphere in which the individual behaves as a social being below the sphere in which he behaves as a fractional being, and finally accepting as the true proper man not the individual as citizen, but the individual as bourgeois.

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.  ( Declaration of the rights, etc., of 1791, article 2. )  The purpose of government is to assure to man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights.  ( Declaration of 1793, art. 1. )

Thus even at the time when its enthusiasm was still fresh and kept at boiling point by the pressure of circumstances, the political life  [78] proclaimed itself to be a mere means whose end is the life of bourgeois society.

It is true that its revolutionary practice was in flagrant contradiction to its theory. While security, for example, was proclaimed to be a right of man, the violation of the secrecy of correspondence was publicly proposed.

While the indefinite liberty of the press (1793 Constitution, art. 122) was guaranteed as a consequence of the right of man to individual liberty, the freedom of the press was completely destroyed, for liberty of the press could not be permitted when it compromised public liberty. (Robespierre jeune, “Parliamentary History of the French Revolution.” Buchez et Roux, p. 135.) This means that the right of man to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with the political life, whereas, according to theory, the political life is only the guarantee of the rights of man, and should therefore be surrendered as soon as its object contradicts these rights of man. But the practice is only the exception and the theory is the rule. If, however, we regard the revolutionary practice as the correct position of the relation, the riddle still remains to be solved, why the relationship was  [79] inverted in the consciousness of the political liberators, the end appearing as the means, and the means as the end. This optical illusion of their consciousness would still be the same riddle, although a psychological, a theoretical riddle.

The riddle admits of easy solution.

The political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the old society, upon which was based the civic society, or the rulership alienated from the people. The political revolution is the revolution of bourgeois society. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word. Feudality. The old civic society had a directly political character, that is, the elements of civic life, as for example property or the family, or the mode and kind of labour, were raised to the level of elements of the community in the form of landlordism, status, and corporation. In this form they determined the relation of the individual to the community, that is his political relation, his relationship of separation and exclusion from the other constituent parts of society. For the latter organization of popular life did not raise property or labour to the level of social elements, but rather completed  [80] their separation from the political whole and constituted them as special societies within society. Thus the vital functions and vital conditions of society continued to be political, although political in the sense of feudality, which means that they excluded the individual from the political whole, and transformed the special relation of his corporation to the political whole into his own general relation to the popular life. As a consequence of this organization, the political unity necessarily appears as the consciousness, the will and the activity of the political unity, and likewise the general State power as the special concern of a ruler and his servants sundered from the people.

The political revolution, which overthrew this domination and raised political affairs to the rank of popular affairs, which constituted the political State as a general concern, that is as a real State, necessarily shattered all Estates, corporations, guilds, privileges, which were just so many expressions of the separation of the people from their community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civic society.

It dissolved civic society into its elemental  [81] parts, on the one hand, into the individuals, on the other hand, into the material and spiritual elements, which formed the vital content, the civic situation of these individuals. It released the political spirit, which was imprisoned in fragments in the various blind alleys of the feudal society; it collected all these dispersed parts of it, liberated it from its entanglement with the civic life, and constituted it as the sphere of the community, of the general popular concerns in ideal independence from its particular elements of civic life. The specific life activity and the specific life situation settled into a merely general significance. They no longer formed the general relation of the individual to the political whole. The public business as such became rather the general business of every individual and the political function became his general function.

But the completion of the idealism of the State was at the same time the completion of the materialism of civic society.

The throwing off of the political yoke was at the same time the throwing off of the bond which had curbed the egoistic spirit of civic society. The political emancipation was at  [82] the same time the emancipation of civic society from politics, from even the semblance of a general content.

Feudal society was resolved into its basic elements, its individual members. But into the individuals who really formed its basis, that is, the egoistic individual.

This individual, the member of civic society, is now the basis, the assumption of the political State. He is recognized as such in the rights of man.

The liberty of the egoistic individual and the recognition of this liberty are, however, tantamount to the recognition of the unbridled movement of the intellectual and material elements which inform him.

The individual was therefore not liberated from religion; he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property; he received freedom of property. He was not freed from the egoism of industry; he received industrial freedom.

The constitution of the political State and the dissolution of civic society into independent individuals—whose relation is right, as the relation of the members of Estates and of guilds was privilege—is accomplished in one  [83] and the same act. But the individual as a member of civic society, the unpolitical individual, necessarily appears as the natural individual. The rights of man appear as natural rights, for the self-conscious activity concentrates itself upon the political act. The egoistic individual is the sediment of the dissolved society, the object of immediate certitude, and therefore a natural object. The political revolution dissolves the civic society into its constituent parts without revolutionizing and subjecting to criticism those parts themselves. It regards bourgeois society, the world of needs, of labour, of private interests, as the foundation of its existence, as an assumption needing no proof, and therefore as its natural basis. Lastly, the individual as a member of bourgeois society counts as the proper individual, as the man in contradistinction to the citizen, because he is man in his sensual, individual, closest existence, whereas political man is only the abstract, artificial individual, the individual as an allegorical, moral person. The real man is only recognized in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is only recognized in the shape of the abstract citizen.

[84] The abstraction of the political man was very well described by Rousseau:  He who dares undertake to give instructions to a nation ought to feel himself capable as it were of changing human nature; of transforming every individual who in himself is a complete and independent whole into part of a greater whole, from which he receives in some manner his life and his being; of altering man’s constitution, in order to strengthen it; of substituting a social and moral existence for the independent and physical existence which we have all received from nature. In a word, it is necessary to deprive man of his native powers, in order to endow him with some which are alien to him, and of which he cannot make use without the aid of other people.

All emancipation leads back to the human world, to relationships, to men themselves.

Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one side, to the member of bourgeois society, to the egoistic, independent individual, on the other side, to the citizen, to the moral person.

Not until the real, individual man is identical with the citizen, and has become a generic being in his empirical life, in his individual  [85] work, in his individual relationships, not until man has recognized and organized his own capacities as social capacities, and consequently the social force is no longer divided by the political power, not until then will human emancipation be achieved.

2.  The Capacity of Modern Jews and Christians to become Free , by  Bruno Bauer.

Under this form Bauer deals with the relation of the Jewish and Christian religion, as well as with the relation of the same to criticism. Its relation to criticism is its relation “to the capacity to be free.”

It follows: “The Christian has only one stage to surmount, viz.: his religion, in order to abolish religion generally,” and therefore to become free. “The Jew, on the contrary, has to break not only with his Jewish essence, but also with the development of the completion of his religion, with a development that has remained alien to him” (p. 71).

Bauer therefore transforms here the question of Jewish emancipation into a purely religious question. The theological scruple as to who  [86] stood the most chance of being saved, Jew or Christian, is here repeated in the enlightened form: which of the two is most capable of emancipation? It is no longer a question of whether Judaism or Christianity makes free? but rather on the contrary: which makes more for freedom, the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity?

“If they wish to be free, Jews should be converted, not to Christianity, but to Christianity in dissolution, to religion generally in dissolution, that is to enlightenment, criticism and its results, to free humanity,” p. 70.

It appears that Jews have still to be converted, but to Christianity in dissolution, instead of to Christianity.

Bauer requires Jews to break with the essence of the Christian religion, a requirement which, as he says himself, does not arise from the development of Jewish essentials.

As Bauer had interpreted Judaism merely as a crude-religious criticism of Christianity, and had therefore read “only” a religious meaning into it, it was to be foreseen that the emancipation of the Jews would be transformed into a philosophic-theological act.

Bauer conceives the ideal abstract being of  [87] the Jew, his religion as his whole being. Consequently he correctly infers: “The Jew gives mankind nothing, when he despises his narrow law, when he abolishes his whole Judaism,” p. 65.

The relation of Jews and Christians is therefore as follows: the sole interest of Christians in the emancipation of the Jews is a general human, a theoretical interest. Judaism is a detrimental fact in the religious eyes of Christians. As soon as their eyes cease to be religious, this fact ceases to be detrimental. The emancipation of Jews in itself is no work for Christians.

But in order to emancipate himself, the Jew has to undertake not only his own work, but at the same time the work of the Christian, the criticism of the synoptics, etc.

We will try to get rid of the theological conception of the question. The question of the capacity of the Jews for emancipation is from our standpoint transformed into the question, what particular social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the capacity for emancipation of the modern Jew is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. This  [88] relation is necessarily disclosed by the special position of Judaism in the modern subjugated world.

Let us consider the real worldly Jews, not the Sabbath Jews, as Bauer does, but the every-day Jews.

We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we will look for the secret of religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical needs, egoism.

What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his secular God? Money.

Very well. Emancipation from huckstering and from money, and therefore from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our epoch.

An organization of society, which would abolish the fundamental conditions of huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would render the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would dissolve like a mist in the real vital air of society. On the other hand: if the Jew recognizes as valueless this his practical essence, and labours for its abolition, he would work himself free of his previous development, and labour for human  [89] emancipation generally, turning against the supreme practical expression of human self-alienation.

We therefore perceive in Judaism a general pervading anti-social element, which has been carried to its highest point by the historical development, in which Jews in this bad relation have zealously co-operated, a point at which it must necessarily dissolve itself.

The emancipation of the Jews in its last significance is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

The Jew has already emancipated himself in Jewish fashion. “The Jew who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines by his financial power the fate of the whole Empire. The Jew who may be deprived of rights in the smallest German State, determines the fate of Europe.”

“While the corporations and guilds excluded the Jew, the enterprise of industry laughs at the obstinacy of the medieval institution.” (Bauer, “The Jewish Question,” p. 14.)

This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in Jewish fashion, not only by taking to himself financial power, but by virtue of the fact that with and without  [90] his co-operation, money has become a world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as Christians have become Jews.

“The pious and politically free inhabitant of New England,” relates Colonel Hamilton, “is a kind of Laokoon, who does not make even the slightest effort to free himself from the serpents which are throttling him. Mammon is his god, he prays to him, not merely with his lips, but with all the force of his body and mind.

“In his eyes, the world is nothing more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that here below he has no other destiny than to become richer than his neighbours. When he travels, he carries his shop or his counter on his back, so to speak, and talks of nothing but interest and profit.”

The practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has reached such a point in North America that the preaching of the Gospel itself, the Christian ministry, has become an article of commerce, and the bankrupt merchant takes to the Gospel, while the minister grown rich goes into business.

[91] “He whom you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as a merchant; his business failing, he became a minister. The other started his career in the ministry, but as soon as he had saved a sum of money, he abandoned the pulpit for the counter. In the eyes of a large number, the ministry is a commercial career.” Beaumont.

According to Bauer, to withhold political rights from the Jew in theory, while in practice he wields enormous power, exercising wholesale the influence he is forbidden to distribute in retail, is an anomaly.

The contradiction between the practical, political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and financial power generally. While the former is raised ideally above the latter, it has in reality become its bond slave.

Judaism has persisted alongside of Christianity not only as religious criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of doubt in the religious parentage of Christianity, but equally because Judaism has maintained itself, and even received its supreme development, in Christian society. The Jew who exists as a peculiar member of bourgeois  [92] society, is only the particular expression of the Judaism of bourgeois society.

Judaism has survived not in spite of, but by virtue of history.

Out of its own entrails, bourgeois society continually creates Jews.

What was the foundation of the Jewish religion? Practical needs, egoism. Consequently the monotheism of the Jew is in reality the polytheism of many needs. Practical needs or egoism are the principle of bourgeois society, and they appear openly as such so soon as bourgeois society gives birth to the political state. The God of practical needs and egoism is money.

Money is the jealous God of Israel, by the side of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities. Money is the general and self-constituted value of all things. Consequently it has robbed the whole world—the world of mankind as well as Nature—of its peculiar value. Money is the being of man’s work and existence alienated from himself, and this alien being rules him, and he prays to it.

The God of the Jews has secularized himself  [93] and become the universal God. Exchange is the Jew’s real God.

The conception of Nature which prevails under the rule of private property and of money is the practical degradation of Nature, which indeed exists in the Jewish religion, but only in imagination.

In this sense Thomas Münzer declared it to be intolerable “that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the growths of the soil.”

What remains as the abstract part of the Jewish religion, contempt for theory, for art, for history, for man as an end in himself, is the real conscious standpoint and virtue of the monied man. The generic relation itself—the relation of man to woman, etc., becomes an object of commerce. Woman is bartered.

The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the monied man generally.

The baseless law of the Jew is only the religious caricature of the baseless morality and of right generally, of the merely formal ceremonies which pervade the world of egoism.

[94] Here also the highest relation of man is the legal relation—the relation to laws which do not govern him because they are the laws of his own will and being, but because they are imposed on him from without. Any infraction thereof is punished.

Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism that Bauer infers from the Talmud, is the relation of the world of egoism to the laws which dominate it, and the cunning circumvention of which is the supreme art of this world.

The movement of this world within its laws is necessarily a continual abrogation of the law.

Judaism cannot develop any further as a religion, that is theoretically, because the philosophy of practical needs is limited by its nature and is exhausted in a few moves.

Judaism could create no new world; it could only draw the new world creations and world relations within the orbit of its activity, because the practical need whose rationale is egoism remains a passive state, which does not extend itself by spontaneous act, but only expands with the development of social conditions.

[95] Judaism reaches its acme with the completion of bourgeois society, but bourgeois society first completes itself in the Christian world. Only under the reign of Christianity, which turns all national, natural, moral and theoretical relations into relations external to man, can bourgeois society separate itself entirely from the political life, dissever all the generic ties of the individual, set egoism in the place of these generic ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomized, mutually hostile individuals.

Christianity sprang out of Judaism. It has again withdrawn into Judaism.

The Christian from the outset was the theorizing Jew; the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has again become a Jew.

Christianity had only appeared to overcome Judaism. It was too noble, too spiritual to abolish the crudeness of practical needs except by elevation into the blue sky.

Christianity is the sublime idea of Judaism. Judaism is the common application of Christianity, but this application could only become general after Christianity had completed the alienation of man from himself, and  [96] theoretically from Nature. Not until then could Judaism attain to general domination and turn the alienated individual and alienated Nature into alienable and saleable objects.

Just as the individual while he remained in the toils of religion could only objectivize his being by turning it into a fantastic and alien being, so under the domination of egoistic needs he can only manifest himself in a practical way and only create practical objects by placing both his products and his activity under the domination of an alien being, and investing them with the significance of an alien being—of money.

The Christian selfishness of bliss is necessarily transmuted in its completed practice into the material selfishness of the Jew, heavenly needs become earthly needs, and subjectivity becomes egoism. We do not explain the Jew’s tenacity from his religion, but rather from the human basis of his religion, that is, practical needs, egoism.

Because the real essence of the Jew has been generally realized and secularized in bourgeois society, the latter could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious essence, which is merely the ideal reflexion of his practical needs.

[97] Consequently, it is not only in the Pentateuch or the Talmud, but also in present-day society that we find the essence of the modern Jew; not as an abstract, but as an extremely empirical being, not merely in the form of the Jew’s limitations, but in that of the Jewish limitations of society.

As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism, the huckster, and the conditions which produce him, the Jew will become impossible, because his consciousness will no longer have a corresponding object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, viz.: practical needs, will have been humanized, because the conflict of the individual sensual existence with the generic existence of the individual will have been abolished.

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

[6] The war of all against all.

[7] The italicized passages following are given in French in the original.

ON THE KING OF PRUSSIA AND SOCIAL REFORM

No. 60 of “Vorwärts” contained an article entitled “The King of Prussia and Social Reform,” signed “A Prussian.” [8]

In the first place, the so-called Prussian refers to the contents of the Royal Prussian Cabinet Order touching the Silesian weavers’ revolt and the opinion of the French journal  La Reforme  upon the Prussian Cabinet Order.  La Reforme  considers that “the fears and the religious feeling of the King” are the source of the Cabinet Order. It even finds in this document a foreshadowing of the great reforms which are in prospect for bourgeois society. “Prussian” instructs  La Reforme  as follows:

“The King and German society have not reached the stage of foreshadowing their reform, and even the Silesian and Bohemian revolts have not created this state of mind. It is impossible to regard the partial distress  [99] of the factory districts as a general question for an unpolitical country like Germany, let alone as a blot upon the whole civilized world. For the Germans the incident has the same significance as any local drought or famine. Consequently the King regards it in the light of a defect of administration or a lack of charity. For the same reason, and because a few soldiers settled accounts with the weak weavers, the destruction of factories and machines caused no fears to the King and the authorities. Even religious feeling did not dictate the Cabinet Order, which is a very sober expression of Christian statecraft, and a doctrine which puts no obstacle in the way of the acceptance of its medicine: the good feeling of Christian hearts. Poverty and crime are two great evils; who can remedy them? The State and the authorities? No, but the union of all Christian hearts.”

The so-called Prussian denies the existence of the King’s “fears” on the ground, amongst others, that a few soldiers settled accounts with the weak weavers.

In a country then where festivals accompanied by liberal toasts and liberal champagne froth—the Dusseldorf festival will be recalled  [100] in this connection—provoke a Royal Cabinet Order, not a single soldier being required, for the purpose of crushing the longing of the whole liberal bourgeoisie for the freedom of the Press and a constitution; in a country where passive obedience is the order of the day; in such a country would the compulsory use of armed force against weak weavers be no event and no startling event? And the weak weavers triumphed at the first encounter. They were suppressed by a subsequently reinforced body of troops. Is the revolt of a crowd of workers less dangerous because it needs no army to suppress it? If the wise Prussian compares the Silesian weavers’ revolt with the English labour revolts, the Silesian weavers will appear to him to be strong weavers.

From the general relation of politics to social crime we will explain why the weavers’ revolt could cause no special “fears” to the King. For the moment only this need be said: the revolt was directed not immediately against the King of Prussia, but against the bourgeoisie. As an aristocrat and an absolute monarch, the King of Prussia can have no love for the bourgeoisie; he can have even  [101] less cause for apprehension when their submission and their impotence are heightened by a strained and difficult relation to the proletariat. Further: the orthodox catholic regards the orthodox protestant with more hostility than the atheist, just as the legitimist regards the liberal with greater hostility than the communist. Not because atheists and communists are related to the catholic and legitimist, but because they are more alien to him than the protestant and the liberal, because they are outside his circle. As a politician, the King of Prussia finds his immediate antagonism in politics, in liberalism.

For the King, the antagonism of the proletariat exists just as little as the King exists for the proletariat. The proletariat must attain to decisive power before it can extinguish antipathies and political antagonisms, and draw upon itself the whole enmity of politics. Lastly: it must even afford a delightful surprise to the well-known character of the King, thirsting for what is interesting and important, to find that “interesting” and “much celebrated” pauperism on his own soil, in conjunction with an opportunity of making people talk about him afresh. How smug [102] he must have felt at the news that henceforth he possessed his “own” Royal Prussian pauperism.

Our “Prussian” is even more unlucky when he denies “religious feeling” to be the source of the Royal Cabinet Order.

Why is not religious feeling the source of this Cabinet Order? Because it is a “very sober” expression of Christian statecraft, a “sober” expression of the doctrine which places no difficulties in the way of the acceptance of its own medicine: the good feeling of Christian hearts.

Is not religious feeling the source of Christian statecraft?

Is not a doctrine which possesses its panacea in the good feeling of Christian hearts based on religious feelings? Does a sober expression of religious feeling cease to be an expression of religious feeling? In fact, it must be a religious feeling greatly infatuated with itself and very intoxicated which would seek in the “unity of Christian hearts the remedy for great evils” which it denies can be supplied by the State and the authorities. It must be a very intoxicated religious feeling which, according to “Prussian’s” admission, finds the  [103] entire evil to consist in the lack of Christian sentiment, and consequently refers the authorities to the sole means of strengthening this sentiment, to “exhortation.” According to “Prussian,” Christian feeling is the object at which the Cabinet Order aims. When it is intoxicated, when it is not sober, religious feeling regards itself as the sole good. Where it perceives evil, it ascribes the latter to its own absence, for if it be the only good, it alone can create good.

How then does the so-called Prussian prove that the Cabinet Order is not the outcome of religious feeling? By describing the Cabinet Order everywhere as an outcome of religious feeling. Is an insight into social movements to be expected from such an illogical mind? Listen to his prattle about the relation of German society to the Labour movement and to social reform generally.

Let us distinguish, and this “Prussian” neglects to do, between the various categories that are comprised within the expression “German society”: government, bourgeoisie, Press, lastly the workers themselves. These are the various divisions with which we are here concerned. “Prussian” lumps them all  [104] together, and appraises them in the lump from a superior standpoint. German society, according to him, has not yet reached the stage of foreshadowing reform.

Why does it lack this instinct?

“In an unpolitical country like Germany,” answers “Prussian,” “it is impossible to regard the partial distresses of the factory districts as a general question, let alone as a blot on the whole civilized world. The incident has for the Germans the same significance as any local drought or famine. Consequently, the King regards it in the light of a defect in administration or a lack of charity.”

“Prussian” therefore explains this inverted conception of labour distress from the peculiarity of an unpolitical country.

It will be conceded that England is a political country. It will be further conceded that England is the country of pauperism, even the word is of English origin.

The study of English conditions is thus the surest means of becoming acquainted with the connection of a political country with pauperism. In England labour distress is not partial but universal, not confined to the factory districts, but co-extensive with the country  [105] districts. The movements are not here in their initial stages; they have recurred periodically for almost a century.

Now how does the English bourgeoisie and the government and Press which are connected with it regard pauperism?

So far as the English bourgeoisie places the responsibility for pauperism on politics, the Whig regards the Tory and the Tory the Whig as the cause of pauperism. According to the Whig, the monopoly of large landed property and the prohibitive legislation against the import of corn constitute the chief source of pauperism. According to the Tory, the whole evil is due to Liberalism, to competition, to a factory system that has been carried too far. Neither of the parties finds the cause to reside in politics generally, but each rather in the policy of its opponent; of a reform in society neither party dreams.

The most decisive expression of the English insight into pauperism—we refer always to the insight of the English bourgeoisie and government—is English political economy, that is the scientific reflexion of English economic conditions.

MacCulloch, one of the best and most famous  [106] of English political economists, who knows existing conditions and has doubtless a clear insight into the movement of bourgeois society, a pupil of the cynical Ricardo, [9]  ventured at a public lecture, amidst applause, to apply to political economy what Bacon said of philosophy: “The man who with true and untiring wisdom suspends his judgment, who progresses gradually, surmounting one after the other the obstacles which impede like mountains the course of study, will in time reach the summit of knowledge, where rest and pure air may be enjoyed, where Nature offers herself to the eye in all her beauty, and whence one may descend by a convenient path to the last details of practice.” Good pure air, the pestilential atmosphere of the English cellar dwellings.

Great natural beauties, the picturesque rags of the English poor, and the shrivelled flesh of the women, ravaged by work and poverty; children lying in dirt; and the stunted creatures produced by overwork in the one-sided processes of the factories! And the most charming last details of practice: prostitution, murder and the gallows!

[107] Middle class Englishmen who are most alive to the danger of pauperism have an inadequate idea of its causes.

For instance Dr Kay, in his pamphlet  Recent Measures for the Promotion of Education in England , reduces everything to neglected education. Upon what grounds, think you? Owing to the lack of education, the worker fails to perceive the “natural laws of trade,” laws which necessarily bring him to pauperism. Consequently he is up in arms against them. This is calculated to “disturb the prosperity of English manufactures and of English trade, destroy the mutual confidence of business people, weaken the stability of political and social institutions.”

So great is the thoughtlessness of the English bourgeoisie and its Press with regard to pauperism, England’s national epidemic.

Let us grant then that the reproaches which our “Prussian” levels at German society are well founded. Is the explanation to be sought in the unpolitical condition of Germany?

But if the bourgeoisie of unpolitical Germany cannot grasp the general significance of a partial distress, the bourgeoisie of political England, on the other hand, has managed to  [108] miss the general significance of a universal distress, which has been forced upon its attention partly by periodical recurrence in time, partly by extension in space, and partly by the failure of all efforts to remedy it.

“Prussian” further lays it to the account of the unpolitical condition of Germany that the King of Prussia finds the cause of pauperism in administrative defects or lack of benevolence, and consequently seeks the remedy for pauperism in administrative and ameliorative measures.

Is this point of view peculiar to the King of Prussia? Let us take a rapid glance at England, the only country where important political measures have been taken against pauperism.

The present English Poor Law dates from the Forty-third Act of the Government of Elizabeth. In what consisted the expedients of this legislation? In the obligation laid on parishes to support their poor workers, in the poor rate, in legal benevolence. For two hundred years this legislation—benevolence by Act of Parliament—has lasted. What is the attitude of Parliament in its Amendment Bill of 1834; after long and painful experience?

[109] First of all, the formidable increase in pauperism is explained from a “defect in administration.”

The administration of the poor rate, which consisted of officials of the respective parishes, is therefore reformed. Unions of about twenty parishes are formed, united in a single administration. A Board of Guardians, elected by taxpayers, assembles on an appointed day in the residence of the Union and decides upon the granting of relief. These boards are coordinated and supervised by officials of the Government, the Central Commission of Somerset House, the Ministry of Pauperism, Frenchman has aptly described it. The capital which this administration supervises is almost equal to the amount which the French War Office costs. The number of local administrations which it employs amounts to 500, and each of these local administrations keeps at least twelve officials busy.

The English Parliament did not stop short at the mere reform of the administration.

The chief source of the acute state of English pauperism it found in the poor law itself. Benevolence, which is the legal remedy for social crime, favours social crime. As  [110] regards pauperism in general, it is an eternal natural law, according to the theory of Malthus: “As the population unceasingly tends to overstep the means of subsistence, benevolence is folly, a public encouragement to poverty. The State can therefore do nothing more than leave poverty to its fate and at the most soften death for the poor.” With this amiable theory the English Parliament combines the opinion that pauperism is poverty for which the worker is himself responsible. It should therefore not be regarded as a misfortune, but rather be suppressed and punished as a crime.

Thus the workhouse system arose, that is, the houses of the poor, whose internal arrangements deter the poverty-stricken from seeking a refuge from starvation. In the workhouse benevolence is ingeniously combined with the revenge of the bourgeoisie upon the poor who appeal to its charity.

England, therefore, at first attempted to destroy pauperism by benevolence and administrative measures. Then it perceived in the progressive increase of pauperism, not the necessary consequence of modern industry, but rather the consequence of the English poor rate. It regarded the universal distress  [111] as nothing more than a peculiarity of English legislation. What was formerly ascribed to the lack of charity was now attributed to a superfluity of charity. Finally, poverty was regarded as the fault of the poor, and punished as such.

The general significance to which pauperism has attained in political England is limited to the fact that, in course of development, in spite of the administrative measures, pauperism has grown into a national institution, and has therefore inevitably become the subject of a ramified and extensive administration, an administration, however, which no longer aims at extinguishing it, but at disciplining and perpetuating it. This administration has abandoned all thought of stopping up the source of pauperism by constructive measures; it is content to dig a grave for it with official gentleness whenever it breaks out on the surface of the official country. Instead of going beyond the administrative and charitable measures, the English State has actually gone back upon them. Its administration is confined to that pauperism which is so despairing as to allow itself to be caught and detained.

So far, therefore, “Prussian” has not  [112] demonstrated anything peculiar in the procedure of the King of Prussia. But why, exclaims the great man with rare simplicity: “Why does not the King of Prussia immediately order the education of all destitute children?” Why does he first look to the authorities and wait upon their plans and proposals?

The over-wise “Prussian” may calm himself on learning that in this respect the King of Prussia displays as little originality as in his other actions, that he has even adopted the only course that a Chief of State can adopt.

Napoleon desired to destroy mendicancy at one blow. He instructed his authorities to draw up proposals for the extirpation of mendicancy in the whole of France. The project kept him waiting; and Napoleon lost patience. Writing to his Home Secretary, Cretet, he ordered him to destroy mendicancy within one month, and said: “One should not tarry in this world without leaving behind that which would commend our memory to posterity. Do not keep me waiting another three or four months for information; you have your lawyers, your prefects, your properly trained engineers of roads and bridges, set  [113] all these to work, do not go to sleep in the usual official manner.” Within a few months everything was done. On the 5th July 1808 a law was passed which put down mendicancy. How? By means of the depôts, which were rapidly transformed into penal institutions, and it was not long before the poor would only reach the harbour of these institutions by way of legal punishment. And yet M. Noailles du Gard, member of the Legislative Assembly, exclaimed at the time: “Everlasting gratitude to the hero who assures a place of refuge for the needy and sustenance to the poor: childhood will no longer be neglected, poor families will no longer be deprived of their resources, nor the workers of encouragement and employment. Our steps will no longer be dogged by the disgusting spectacle of infirmities and of shameful poverty.” The last cynical passage is the single truth in this eulogy.

If Napoleon asks for the views of his lawyers, prefects, and engineers, why should not the King of Prussia address himself to  his  authorities?

Why did not Napoleon order the immediate extinction of mendicancy? Of equal value  [114] is “Prussian’s” question: “Why does not the King of Prussia order the immediate education of neglected children?” Does “Prussian” know what the King should have ordered? Nothing less than the immediate extinction of the proletariat. Children cannot be educated unless they are fed and freed from industrial labour. The feeding and educating of neglected children is tantamount to feeding and educating the whole adolescent proletariat, and would mean the extinction of the proletariat and of pauperism.

The Convention once had the courage to order the abolition of pauperism, yet not “immediately,” as “Prussian” requires of his king, but only after it had entrusted the Committee of Public Safety with the preparation of the necessary plans and proposals, and after the latter had utilized the exhaustive investigations of the Constituent Assembly into the state of French poverty and proposed through Barrère the establishment of the  Livre de la bienfaisance nationale , etc. What was the result of the instructions of the Convention? That there was one more order in the world and a year later starving women besieged the Convention.

[115] The Convention, however, represented the maximum of political energy, of political power, and of political insight.

No government in the world has ever issued peremptory orders concerning pauperism, without an understanding with the authorities. The English parliament even sent commissioners into all the countries of Europe, in order to become acquainted with the various administrative remedies for pauperism. But so far as States have been concerned with pauperism, they have either confined themselves to administrative and charitable measures, or have gone back upon such measures.

Can the State behave otherwise?

The State will never find the cause of social crime in the “State and the institution of society,” as “Prussian” requires of his king. Where there are political parties, each finds the cause of every evil in the fact that its opponent, instead of itself, is at the helm of the State. Even the radical and revolutionary politicians seek the cause of the evil not in the essence of the State, but in a specific form of the State, which they aim at replacing by another State form.

From the political standpoint, the State and  [116] the institution of society are not two separate things. The State is the institution of society. So far as the State recognizes social evils, it attributes them either to natural laws, which are amenable to no human power, or to the defects of private life, which is independent of the State, or in the futility of the administration which is dependent on it. Thus England finds poverty to be grounded in the natural law according to which the population is always bound to overstep the means of subsistence. According to another side, it explains pauperism from the wicked dispositions of the poor, just as the King of Prussia explained it from the unchristian sentiment of the rich, and just as the Convention explained it from the counter-revolutionary and suspicious dispositions of the property owners. England therefore punishes the poor, the King of Prussia exhorts the rich, and the Convention decapitates the property owners.

Finally, all States seek the cause of social evil in accidental or deliberate defects of administration, and therefore look to administrative measures for the remedy. Why? Just because the administration is the organized activity of the State.

[117] The State cannot abolish the contradiction between the intentions and the good will of the administration, on the one hand, and its expedients and its resources, on the other hand, without abolishing itself, for it is based upon this contradiction. It is based upon the contradiction between public and private life, upon the contradiction between the general interest and individual interests. The administration is therefore obliged to confine itself to a formal and negative activity, for its power ceases where middle-class life and its work begin. Yes, as against the consequences which spring from the unsocial nature of this middle-class life, this private property, this trade, this industry, this mutual plundering of various middle-class circles, as against these consequences impotence is the natural law of the administration.

For this dismemberment, this slavery of middle-class society, is the natural foundation upon which the modern State rests, just as the civil society of slavery was the natural foundation upon which the antique State rested. The existence of the State is inseparable from the existence of slavery. The antique State and antique slavery—manifest  [118] classical antagonisms—were not more intimately connected than is the modern State with the modern huckstering world—sanctimonious Christian antagonisms. If the modern State wishes to abolish the impotence of its administration, it would have to abolish the present-day mode of living. If it wishes to abolish this mode of living, it would have to abolish itself, for it exists only in opposition to the same. No living person, however, would believe that defects in his existence are due to the vital principle of his life, but would rather attribute them to circumstances outside his life. Suicide is unnatural.

The State cannot therefore believe in the innate impotence of its administration. It can only take notice of formal and accidental defects therein and attempt to remedy them. If these modifications are fruitless, social crime must be a natural imperfection independent of mankind, a law of God, or else the dispositions of private individuals are too vitiated to second the good intentions of the administration. And what perverted private individuals! They murmur against the government whenever the latter restricts freedom, and they demand that the government should  [119] provide against the necessary consequences of this freedom.

The more powerful the State, and the more political, therefore, a country is, all the less is it inclined to seek in the principle of the State, and consequently in the existing institution of society, whose self-conscious and official expression the State is, for the cause of social crime, and to grasp its general principle.

Political understanding is political understanding precisely because it thinks within the limitations of politics. The more acute, the more alert it is, the more incapable it is of perceiving social crime. The classic period of political understanding is the French Revolution. Far from perceiving the source of social defects in the principle of the State, the heroes of the French Revolution rather perceived in social defects the source of political abuses. Thus Robespierre saw in great poverty and great riches only an obstacle to pure democracy. Consequently, he desired to establish a general Spartan frugality.

The principle of politics is will-power. The more one-sided, which means the more complete, political understanding is, all the more does it believe in the omnipotence of  [120] will-power, all the more blind is it to the natural and intellectual limitations to will-power, all the more incapable is it, therefore, of discovering the source of social crime.

No further proof is needed to refute the absurd hope entertained by “Prussian”, according to which “political understanding” is called upon “to discover the roots of social distress in Germany.”

It was ridiculous to impute to the King of Prussia a power which the Convention and Napoleon together did not possess; it was ridiculous to credit him with an insight that went beyond the limits of all politics, an insight which the wise “Prussian” possesses no more than his king.

Let us suppose that “Prussian’s” observations upon the German Government and the German bourgeoisie—the latter is of course included in “German society”—are perfectly justified. Is this section of society more perplexed in Germany than in England and France? Is it possible to be more perplexed than, for example, in England, where perplexity has been elevated into a system?

If Labour revolts are now breaking out all over England, the bourgeoisie and the  [121] Government there are no better advised than in the last third of the eighteenth century. Their sole expedient is material force, and as material force diminishes in the same degree as the spread of pauperism and the insight of the proletariat increase, English perplexity necessarily grows in geometrical proportion.

Lastly, it is in point of fact untrue that the German bourgeoisie has entirely missed the general significance of the Silesian revolt.

In several towns the masters are endeavouring to combine with the journeymen. All the liberal German newspapers, the organs of the liberal bourgeoisie, are gushing about the organization of labour, the reform of society, the criticism of monopoly and of competition, etc. All this as a result of the labour movements. The newspapers of Treves, Aachen, Cologne, Wesel, Mannheim, Breslau, even of Berlin, are constantly publishing quite intelligent articles on social affairs, from which “Prussian” may learn at any time. Yes, letters from Germany are constantly expressing astonishment at the slight opposition which the bourgeoisie offers to social tendencies.

[122] If “Prussian” had been better acquainted with the history of the social movement, he would have put his question the other way round. Why does the German bourgeoisie itself interpret the partial distress as relatively universal? Whence the animosity and cynicism of the political bourgeoisie? Whence the supineness and the sympathies of the unpolitical bourgeoisie with respect to the proletariat?

Now to “Prussian’s” oracular pronouncements concerning the German workers. “The German poor,” he puns, “are not wiser than the poor Germans, that is, they can nowhere see beyond their hearth, their factory, their district: the whole question has so far been neglected by the all-comprehending political soul.”

In order to be able to compare the condition of the German workers with the condition of the French and English workers, “Prussian” must compare the first manifestation, the beginning of the English and French Labour movement, with the German movement which has just begun. He neglects to do this. His reasoning therefore runs upon a triviality, such as that industry in Germany is not yet so  [123] developed as in England, or that a movement in its beginnings looks different from a movement that has made progress.

If, however, “Prussian” would place himself at the correct standpoint, he would find that not any of the French and English Labour revolts possessed such a theoretical and conscious character as the Silesian weavers’ revolt.

In the first place, let us recall the song of the weavers, those bold accents of the struggle, wherein hearth, factory, and district are not once mentioned, but the proletariat immediately gets into the stride of its opposition to the society of private property in the most vigorous, ruthless, and powerful fashion. The Silesian revolt begins just where the French and English Labour revolts end, with the consciousness of the being of the proletariat. The action itself bears this superior character. Not only the machines, these rivals of the worker, were destroyed, but also the ledgers, the title of property, and while all other movements have been directed in the first place against the visible enemy, the lords of industry, this movement was simultaneously directed against the bankers, the concealed foe.

[124] Lastly, no single English Labour revolt has been conducted with equal bravery, circumspection, and persistence.

As regards the state of education or the capacity for education of the German workers generally, I may recall Weitling’s excellent writings, which frequently represent an advance upon Proudhon in a theoretical respect, although they may be inferior to him in finish. Where can the bourgeoisie—their philosophers and scholars included—show a work similar to Weitling’s “Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom” pertaining to the emancipation of the bourgeoisie—the political emancipation? If we compare the mediocrity of German political literature with this expansive and brilliant literary début of the German worker; if we compare this giant child’s shoe of the proletariat with the dwarf proportions of the worn-out political shoe of the German bourgeoisie, we must predict an athletic figure for the German Cinderella. It must be admitted that the German proletariat is the theorist of the European proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its political economist, and the French proletariat its politician. Germany possesses a classical vocation for the social  [125] revolution although she is incapable of the political revolution. For if the impotence of the German bourgeoisie is the same thing as the political impotence of Germany, the talent of the German proletariat—even apart from German theory—is the social talent of Germany. The disproportion between the philosophical and the political development in Germany is no abnormality. It is a necessary disproportion. Only by means of socialism can a philosophical people put its philosophy into practice, and only in the proletariat, therefore, can it find the active element for its emancipation.

At this moment, however, I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain to “Prussian” the relation of “German society” to the social transformation, and from this relation to explain, on the one side, the weak reaction of the German bourgeoisie to socialism, and, on the other hand, the exceptional talent of the German proletariat for socialism. The first elements for the understanding of this phenomenon he will find in my introduction to the criticism of Hegel’s philosophy of right (“Franco-German Annuals”). (See pp. 11  et seq.  of this book.)

The wisdom of the German poor is therefore  [126] in inverse proportion to the wisdom of the poor Germans. Thus “Prussian’s” attempt to manipulate his thought in the form of antithesis on the occasion of the Silesian labour unrest had led to the greatest antithesis against the truth. What a thoughtful mind should do in connection with a first outbreak, such as the Silesian workers’ revolt, is not to play the schoolmaster to this event, but to study its peculiar character. For this a certain amount of scientific insight and some goodwill is necessary, whereas for the other operation a glib phraseology, saturated in shallow egoism, fully suffices.

Why does “Prussian” judge the German workers so contemptuously? Because he finds that the “whole question,”—namely the question of labour distress—has not yet been taken up by the “all-comprehending political soul.” He carries his Platonic love to the political soul so far as to say:

“All revolts which break out from the isolation of men from the community and the separation of their thoughts from the social principles will be extinguished in blood and unreason; but if the distress first creates the understanding, and if the political  [127] understanding of the Germans discovers the roots of social distress, then these incidents would also be felt in Germany as the symptom of a great transformation.”

In the first half of the sentence we read: if distress creates understanding, and in the second half: if political understanding discovers the roots of social distress. Simple understanding in the first half of the antithesis becomes political understanding in the second half, just as the simple distress of the first half of the antithesis becomes social distress in the second half. Why has the artist in style so unequally endowed the two halves of the antithesis?

Had “Prussian” written: “If social distress creates political understanding, and if political understanding discovers the roots of social distress,” the absurdity of this antithesis could not have escaped any impartial reader. Such a reader would have immediately wondered why the anonymous writer did not couple social understanding with social distress and political understanding with political distress, as the simplest logic dictates? Now to business.

So false is it to say that social distress creates political understanding that the truth  [128] is rather the reverse; social well-being creates political understanding. Political understanding is an intellectual quality and is given to him who already has, who lives in clover. Our “Prussian” should hear what a French political economist, M. Michel Chevalier, has to say upon this subject: “In the year 1789 when the bourgeoisie revolted, the sole thing they wanted was a share in the government of the country. Emancipation consisted in snatching the direction of public affairs, the high civic, military and religious functions, from the hands of the privileged persons who possessed the monopoly of these functions. Wealthy and enlightened, able to govern themselves, they desired to escape from the  régime du bon plaisir .”

How incapable political understanding is of discovering the source of social distress we have already demonstrated to “Prussian.” Another word about this opinion of his. The more cultivated and general the political understanding of a people is, all the more does the proletariat—at least at the beginning of the movement—dissipate its energies in irrational, useless, and brutally suppressed revolts. Because it thinks along political lines, it  [129] perceives the cause of all evils in the wills of men, and all remedies to lie in force and the overthrow of a particular form of the State. In proof whereof we cite the first outbreak of the French proletariat. The workers in Lyons believed they were only pursuing political aims and were only soldiers of the Republic, whereas they were in truth soldiers of socialism. Thus their political understanding hid from them the roots of social distress; it distorted their insight into their real aims; their political understanding deceived their social instinct.

“Prussian” prophesies the suppression of revolts which break out owing to the “isolation of men from the community and the separation of their thoughts from social principles.”

We have shown that the Silesian revolt was by no means characterized by the separation of ideas from social principles. It remains to deal with the “isolation of men from the community.” By community is to be understood in this connection the political community, the State institution. It is the old story of unpolitical Germany.

But do not all revolts without exception  [130] break out from the isolation of men from the community? Does not every revolt necessarily presuppose this isolation? Would the Revolution of 1789 have taken place without the isolation of the French citizens from the community? Its aim, in fact, was to end this isolation.

But the community from which the worker is isolated is a community of quite a different nature from and of quite other dimensions than the political community. This community, from which his own labour separates him, is life itself, physical and intellectual life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, the human community.

Human life is the real community of men. Just as the isolation from this body is more complete, more painful, more to be feared, more contradictory than is isolation from the political community, so too the removal of this isolation, and even a partial reaction, a revolt against the same, are tasks all the more infinite as man is more infinite than the citizen, and human life than political life. However partial the industrial revolt may be, it conceals within itself a universal soul: political revolt may be never so universal but  [131] it hides a narrow-minded spirit under the most colossal form.

“Prussian” worthily closes his article with the following phrase: “A social revolution without a political soul (that is, without organized insight from the standpoint of the whole) is impossible.”

We have seen that a social revolution maybe considered to be from the standpoint of the whole because, even if it only occurs in a factory district, it is a protest of men against degraded life, because it proceeds from the standpoint of the real individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual reacts, is the real community of men, the civic community.

The political soul of a revolution, on the other hand, consists in the endeavour of the classes without political influence to abolish their isolation from the community and from government. Their standpoint is that of the State, an abstract whole, which exists only in and through its separation from real life, which is unthinkable without the organized antagonism between the general idea and the individual existence of man. Consequently a revolution of political souls organizes a ruling clique in  [132] society, in accordance with the limited and doubly-cleft nature of these souls, at the cost of society.

We should like to confide to “Prussian” what a “social revolution with a political soul” is; we should like at the same time to suggest to him that not once has he been able to raise himself above the restricted political standpoint.

A “social” revolution with a political soul is either a composite absurdity, if “Prussian” means by “social” revolution a social revolution in contrast to a political, and yet invests the social revolution with a political, instead of a social, soul. Or a “social revolution with a political soul” is nothing but what is otherwise called a “political revolution” or a “revolution pure and simple.”

Every revolution dissolves the old society; in so far it is social. Every revolution overthrows the old power; in so far it is political.

“Prussian” may choose between the paraphrase and the absurdity.

Equally ridiculous is the notion of a political revolution with a social soul. The revolution as such—the overthrow of the existing power and the dissolution of the old conditions—is  [133] a political act. But without a revolution, socialism cannot be enforced. It requires this political act, so far as it has need of the process of destruction and dissolution. But where its organizing activity begins, where its proper aim, its soul, emerges, there socialism casts away the political hull.

[8] Arnold Ruge was the author of this article.

[9] Marx in later years changed his views about MacCulloch and Ricardo.

MORALIZING CRITICISM AND CRITICAL MORALITY: A POLEMIC AGAINST KARL HEINZEN

“I cannot imagine that Mr Engels and our communists are so blind as not to see that force also dominates property, and that the injustice in the property relations is only maintained by force. I call that person a fool and a coward who cherishes animosity towards a bourgeois because he is accumulating money, and leaves a king in peace because he has acquired power,” states Mr Heinzen.

“Force also dominates property.” Property is likewise also a species of power. The economists call capital, for example, “the command over other labour.” We are thus confronted with two kinds of force or power: on the one hand, the power of property, that is, of the property owner; on the other hand, the political power, the State power. “Force also dominates property” means that property  [135] has not yet got the political power in its hands, but is rather vexed by it, for example, by arbitrary taxes, by confiscation, by privileges, by the disturbing interference of the bureaucracy in industry and trade and the like.

In other words: The bourgeoisie is not yet politically constituted as a class. The State power is not yet its own power. In countries where the bourgeoisie has already conquered political power, and where political rule is nothing less than the rule, not of the individual bourgeois over the workers, but of the bourgeois class over the whole of society, Mr Heinzen’s dictum has lost its meaning. The propertyless are, of course, not affected by political rule, so far as it relates directly to property.

Whilst, therefore, Mr Heinzen fancies he is uttering a truth as eternal as it is original, he has only recorded the fact that the German bourgeoisie must capture the political power, that is, he is saying unconsciously what Engels says, in the brave belief that he is saying the opposite.

“The injustice in the property relations,” continues Mr Heinzen, “is only maintained  [136] by force.” Either Mr Heinzen understands by “the injustice in the property relations” the above-mentioned pressure, which the German bourgeoisie still suffers in its “most sacred” interests from the absolute monarchy, and then he only repeats what has just been said—or he understands by “the injustice in the property relations” the economic relations of the workers, and in that case his revelation amounts to this: The existing bourgeois property relations are “maintained” by the State power, which the bourgeoisie has organized for the protection of its property relations. The proletarians must, therefore, overthrow the political power where it is already in the hands of the bourgeoisie. They must themselves attain to power, to revolutionary power. Mr Heinzen again says unconsciously what Engels says, again in the sincere conviction of having said the opposite. What he says he does not mean, and what he means he does not say.

Moreover, if the bourgeoisie politically, that is, through the agency of its State power, maintains “the injustice in the property relations,” it does not create the latter. The “injustice in the property relations,”  [137] conditioned by the modern division of labour, the modern form of exchange, competition, concentration, etc., does not in any way proceed from the political rule of the bourgeoisie, but, contrariwise, the political rule of the bourgeoisie proceeds from these modern relations of production, which are proclaimed by the bourgeois economists to be necessary and eternal laws.

If, therefore, the proletariat should overthrow the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory would be only temporary, only an episode in the service of the bourgeois revolution, so long as the material conditions which would render necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production, and consequently the definitive overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie, had not yet been created in the course of historical development. From this point of view, the Reign of Terror in France did no more than to clear away the feudal ruins from French soil by its hammer blows.

The anxious and cautious bourgeoisie would have taken decades to perform this work. The bloody action of the people, therefore, prepared the way. Similarly, the overthrow of the  [138] absolute monarchy would have been merely a momentary incident, if the economic conditions for the rule of the bourgeois class had not been developed to the point of ripeness.

Men built for themselves a new world, not out of earthly goods, as the bluff Heinzen superstition would have us believe, but out of the historical achievements of their shipwrecked world. In the course of development, they have first to create the material conditions for a new society themselves, and no effort of the mind or the will can save them from this destiny.

It is typical of bluff common sense that where it manages to see difference, it does not see unity, and where it sees unity, it does not see difference. If perchance it sets up distinguishing qualities, it immediately petrifies them, and sees nothing but sophistry in the notion of rubbing these slabs of ideas against each other until they catch fire.

In stating that money and force, property and rule, money-making and power-acquiring are not the same, it is merely uttering a tautology.

How “money-making” is turned into  [139] “winning power,” and “property” into “political rule,” and how, instead of the hard and fast distinctions drawn by Mr Heinzen, the two forces are interrelated to the point of unity, of all this he may quickly convince himself by observing how the communes purchased their municipal rights; how the citizens enticed money out of the pockets of the feudal lords by trade and industry, on the one hand, and disintegrated their landed property by bills of exchange, on the other hand; aiding absolute monarchy to triumph over the great feudatories who were thus being undermined, just as later they exploited the financial crises of absolute monarchy itself, etc.; how the most absolute monarch became dependent on the Stock Exchange barons through the national debt system—a product of modern industry and of modern commerce; and how in the international relations of peoples industrial monopoly is immediately transmuted into political rule, as in the case of the princes of the Holy Alliance in the “German liberation war,” who were only the paid foot soldiers of England, etc., etc.

Mr Heinzen cannot fail to notice that even in Prussia the power of property has been  [140] raised to the point of a  mariage forcé  with the political power. Listen further:

“You wish to give a contemporary meaning to social questions; and yet you fail to see that there is no more important question than that of monarchy versus republic.” A little while ago Mr Heinzen only saw the  distinction  between the money power and the political power, now he only sees  unity  between political questions and social questions.

The political relations of men are, of course, also social relations, as are all relations which bind men to men. All questions pertaining to the relations of men to each other are social questions at the same time.

The “social questions” which have been “discussed in our time” increase in importance in the degree that we emerge from the realm of absolute monarchy. Socialism and communism did not originate in Germany, but in England, France and North America. The first appearance of a really active communist party may be placed within the period of the middle-class revolution, the moment when constitutional monarchy was abolished. The most consistent republicans, in England the Levellers, in France Babeuf, Buonarotti,  [141] etc., were the first to proclaim these “social questions.” The “Conspiracy of Babeuf,” written by his friend and comrade Buonarotti, shows how these republicans derived their social insight from the “historical movement.” It also demonstrates that when the social question of princedom versus republic is removed, not a single social question of the kind that interests the proletariat has been solved.

The property question as it presents itself in “our time” cannot be recognized under the form in which Mr Heinzen clothes it,  i.e.  “whether it is right that one man should possess everything and another nothing, whether man as an individual need possess anything at all,” and suchlike simple questions of conscience and pious phrases.

The question of property assumes different forms according to the successive stages of development of industry in general and according to its particular stages of development in various countries.

For the Galician peasant, for example, the property question reduces itself to the transformation of feudal landed property into small middle-class holdings. It has for him the  [142] same meaning as it had for the French peasants of 1789. On the other hand, the English agricultural labourer does not stand in any relation to the landed proprietor. He comes into contact merely with the farmer, that is, the industrial capitalist who carries on agriculture upon factory lines. This industrial capitalist, on his part, who pays a rent to the land owner, stands in a direct relationship to the latter. The abolition of landed property is therefore the most important property question that exists for the English industrial bourgeoisie, and the struggle against the Corn Laws had no other meaning. The abolition of capital, on the other hand, is the property question as understood equally by the English agricultural labourer and by the English factory worker.

Both in the English and in the French Revolutions the property question presented itself in such wise that it seemed to be imperative to enforce free competition and to effect the abolition of all feudal property relations, such as manorial rights, guilds, monopolies, which had been transformed into fetters upon the industry which was developing between the sixteenth and eighteenth  [143] centuries. Lastly, in “our time” the property question means the abolition of the antagonisms which are produced by the great industry, the development of the world market and of free competition.

The property question, according to the successive stages in the development of industry, has always been the life question of a particular class. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the point at issue was the abolition of feudal property relations, the property question was the life question of the bourgeois class. In the nineteenth century, when the point at issue is the abolition of bourgeois property relations, the property question is a life question for the working class.

The property question, which in “our time” is a world-historical question, has therefore a meaning only in the modern bourgeois society. The more developed this society is, the more therefore the bourgeoisie develops itself economically in a country, and consequently the more the State power has assumed a bourgeois expression, all the more acutely does the social question obtrude itself, in France more acutely than in Germany, in England more  [144] acutely than in France, in the constitutional monarchy more acutely than in the absolute monarchy, in the Republic more acutely than in the constitutional monarchy. Thus, for example, the crises in the credit system and in speculation, etc., are nowhere more acute than in North America. Nowhere, too, does social inequality obtrude itself more harshly than in the Eastern States of North America, because it is nowhere less glossed over by political inequality. If pauperism has not yet developed here to the extent that it has in England, this is due to economic conditions which need not be further discussed at this place. Meanwhile pauperism is making the most delightful progress.

“In a country where there is no privileged class, where all classes of society have equal rights” (but the difficulty lies in the existence of classes), “and where our population is far from pressing on the means of subsistence, it is in fact alarming to see pauperism growing with such rapidity.” (Report of Mr Meredith to the Pennsylvanian Congress.) “It is proved that pauperism in Massachusetts has increased by 60 per cent, in twenty-five years.” (From Miles’ Register.)

[145] As in England under the name of Chartists, so in North America under the name of National Reformers, the workers are forming a political party, whose slogan is not—monarchy versus republic, but rule of the working class versus rule of the bourgeois class.

While therefore it is just in the modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding political forms of the constitutional or the republican representative state, that the “property question” has become the most important “social question,” it is the peculiar situation of the German middle-class man which prompts him to assert that the question of princedom is the most important social question of the time.

“The princes,” Mr Heinzen tells us, are the “chief authors of all poverty and all distress.” Where princedom has been abolished, this explanation is of course out of place, and the slavery system upon which the ancient republics broke down—the slavery system which will lead to the most terrible collisions in the southern states of republican North America, the slavery system may exclaim with Jack Falstaff: and if reasons were as plentiful as blackberries!

[146] Once upon a time the people were obliged to place at their head the most eminent personalities to conduct public affairs. Later these positions were transmitted through families. And lastly the stupidity and depravity of mankind have tolerated this abuse for centuries. If a conference were convened of all the native pot-house politicians of Europe, they could answer nothing different. And if one went through Mr Heinzen’s entire works, they would yield no other answer.

Bluff commonsense believes that it explains princedom by declaring itself to be the latter’s opponent. But the difficulty which confronts this normal method of reasoning is to show how the opponent of healthy commonsense and of moral dignity came to be born, and to drag out a remarkably tenacious life for centuries. Nothing simpler. For centuries healthy commonsense and moral dignity were non-existent. In other words, the sense and the morality of centuries answered to the institution of princedom, instead of contradicting it. And even this sense and this morality of bygone centuries are not understood by the “healthy commonsense” of to-day. The latter does not grasp it, and  [147] therefore despises it. It flees from history to morality, which allows it full play to the heavy artillery of its moral indignation.

In the same fashion as political “healthy commonsense” here explains the rise and continuance of princedom as the work of unreason, in the same way religious “healthy commonsense” explains heresy and unbelief as the work of the devil. In the same manner irreligious “healthy commonsense” explains religion as the work of the devil, of the parsons.

But once Mr Heinzen has explained the origin of princedom by means of moral commonplaces, the “connection of princedom with social conditions” follows quite naturally. Listen: “An individual sequestrates the state, and more or less sacrifices a whole people, not only materially, but also morally, to his person and his supporters, institutes a graduated series of ranks, divides the people, as if they were fat and lean cattle, into various classes, and, solely on the ground of affection for his own person, makes every member of the State the official enemy of the other.”

Mr Heinzen has in mind the princes upon the top of the social structure in Germany.  [148] He does not doubt for a moment that they have made and are daily renewing their social foundation. Can a simpler explanation be afforded of the connection of the monarchy with social conditions, of which it is the official political expression, than by making this connection the work of the princes? What is the connection between representative chambers and the modern middle-class society which they represent? The former have made the latter. Similarly political divine right with its apparatus and its gradations has made the profane world, of which it is the holy of holies. By a parity of reasoning religious divine right has made the secular conditions of which it constitutes a fantastic and glorified reflexion.

Bluff commonsense, which proffers such homely wisdom with beseeming pathos would of course be morally indignant at the opponent who attempted to show that the apple did not make the apple tree.

Modern historical research has shown how absolute monarchy appeared in the period of transition, when the old feudal classes were decaying and the medieval burgher class was evolving into the modern bourgeois class,  [149] without either of the disputing parties being able to settle accounts with the other.

The elements out of which absolute monarchy builds itself up cannot in any way be its product: they rather form its preliminary condition, the historic origin of which is too well known to be repeated here. That absolute monarchy in Germany developed later and is lasting longer is to be explained by reference to the distorted course of development of the German middle class. The solution to the riddle of this course of development is to be found in the history of commerce and industry.

The decay of the German free towns, the destruction of the Order of Knighthood, the defeat of the peasants—the local supremacy of the princes which arose therefrom—the decay of German industry and of German commerce, which were based on entirely medieval conditions, at the same time as the modern world market was being opened up and large-scale manufacture was thriving—the depopulation and the barbarous condition that followed in the wake of the Thirty Years War—the character of the reviving national branches of industry, such as the small linen industry,  [150] which are adapted to patriarchal conditions and relations—the nature of the articles of export, the greater part of which belonged to agriculture, and therefore almost alone increased the material sources of life of the landed nobility, and consequently the power of the latter over the citizens—the depressed position of Germany in the world market in general, whereby the subsidies paid by foreigners to the princes became a chief source of national income, the consequent dependence of the citizens upon the Court, etc. etc.,—all these conditions, within which German society and a political organization corresponding thereto developed, are transformed by Heinzen’s bluff common sense into a few pithy sayings, the pith of which consists in the assertion that “German princedom” made and daily remakes “German society.”

The optimistic delusion which enables healthy common sense to find in princedom the source of German society, instead of seeing the source of princedom in German society, is susceptible of an easy explanation.

It sees truly enough at first glance, and its first glance is always keenest, that the German princes maintain and consolidate the  [151] old German social condition, upon which their existence stands or falls, and forcibly react against the dissolving elements. It likewise sees, on the other hand, the dissolving elements striving with the princely power. All the healthy five senses testify at once that princedom is the foundation of the old society, its gradations, its prejudices, and its antagonisms.

Regarded more closely, however, this phenomenon only contradicts the rough and ready opinion for which it furnished the innocent occasion.

The powerful reactionary rôle which princedom assumed only proves that in the pores of the old society a new society has evolved, which feels the political husk—the appropriate covering of the old society—to be an unnatural fetter which it must burst. The more immature these new elements are, the more conservative appears to be even the most vigorous reaction of the old political power. The reaction of princedom, instead of proving that it makes the old society, rather proves that it is at the end of its tether so soon as the material conditions of the old society are obsolete. Its reaction is at the same time the  [152] reaction of the old society, which is still the official society.

If the material conditions of life of society have so far developed that the transformation of their official political shape has become a vital necessity for it, the entire physiognomy of the old political power undergoes a transformation. Thus absolute monarchy now aims at decentralization, instead of at centralization, wherein consists its proper civilizing activity.

Itself the product of the defeat of the feudal orders, and even taking the most active part in their destruction, it tries now to retain at least the semblance of feudal distinctions. Formerly favouring commerce and industry and also the rise of the burgher class, as being necessary conditions both of the national power and of its own brilliance, absolute monarchy now puts all kinds of obstacles in the way of commerce and industry, which have become more and more dangerous weapons in the hands of a powerful bourgeoisie. From the town, which fostered its rise, it casts an anxious and dulled glance over the countryside, which is fertilized with the corpses of its old heroic foes.

[153] But what Mr Heinzen understands by the “connection of politics with social conditions” is really only the connection of German princedom with German distress and German poverty.

The monarchy, like every other State, exists externally for the working class only in the form of taxes. Taxes constitute the existence of the State economically expressed. Officials and parsons, soldiers and ballet dancers, schoolmasters and beadles, Greek museums and Gothic towers, civil list and army list—the communal seeds wherein all these fabulous existences embryonically slumber are—the taxes.

And what reasoning citizen would not refer the starving people to the taxes, to the ill-gotten gains of the princes, as the source of their poverty? German princes and German distress! In other words, the taxes on which the princes live in opulence and which the people pay with the sweat of their blood! What inexhaustible material for declamatory human saviours!

No doubt the monarchy is very expensive. One has only to glance at the North American budget and compare it with what our  [154] thirty-eight duodecimo fatherland has to pay in order to be administered and over-disciplined.

The blustering outbreaks of this conceited demagogy are answered not by the communists, but by such middle-class economists as Ricardo, Senior, etc., in a few words.

The economic existence of the State is the taxes. The economic existence of the worker is wages. What has to be settled is the relation between wages and taxes.

The average wage is necessarily reduced by competition to the minimum, that is, to a wage which allows the workers and their race to drag out a scanty existence. Taxes form a part of this minimum, for the political business of the worker just consists in paying taxes. If the whole of the taxes that fall on the working class were drastically cut down, the necessary consequence would be that wages would be reduced by the whole amount of the taxes now included in them. Either the profit of the employer would thereby be increased to the same extent, or a change in the method of raising taxes would have taken place. Instead of the capitalist advancing to-day in wages the taxes which the worker must pay, he would no longer pay  [155] them in this roundabout fashion, but directly to the State. If wages are higher in North America than in Europe, this is by no means due to its lighter taxation. It is the consequence of its territorial, commercial, and industrial situation. The demand for workers in relation to the supply of workers is considerably greater than in Europe. And this truth is known already to every pupil of Adam Smith.

On the other hand, so far as the bourgeoisie is concerned, both the incidence and the nature of the taxes, as well as the spending of the money, are a vital question, both on account of their influence upon commerce and industry, and because taxes are the golden cord with which absolute monarchy is strangled.

After vouchsafing such profound explanations about the “connection of politics with social conditions” and the “class relations” with the State power, Mr Heinzen exclaims triumphantly: “The ‘communistic narrow-mindedness’ which divides men into classes, or antagonizes them according to their handicraft, has been avoided by me. I have left open the ‘possibility’ that ‘humanity’ is not  [156] always determined by ‘class’ or the ‘length of one’s purse.'” Bluff common sense transforms the class distinction into the “length of the purse” and the class antagonism into trade quarrels. The length of the purse is a purely quantitative distinction, which may perchance antagonize any two individuals of the same class. That the medieval guilds confronted each other on the basis of handicraft is well known. But it is likewise well known that the modern class distinction is by no means based on handicraft; rather the division of labour within the same class produces very different methods of work.

It is very ‘possible’ that particular individuals are not always influenced in their attitude by the class to which they belong, but this has as little effect upon the class struggle as the secession of a few nobles to the  tiers état  had on the French Revolution. And then these nobles at least joined a class, the revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie. But Mr Heinzen sees all classes melt away before the solemn idea of ‘humanity.’

If he believes that entire classes, which are based upon economic conditions independent of their will, and are set by these conditions  [157] in a relation of mutual antagonism, can break away from their real relations, by virtue of the quality of ‘humanity’ which is inherent in all men, how easy it should be for a prince to raise himself above his ‘princedom’, above his ‘princely handicraft’ by virtue of ‘humanity’? Why does he take it amiss when Engels perceives a ‘brave Emperor Joseph’ behind his revolutionary phrases?

But if, on the one hand, Mr Heinzen obliterates all distinctions, in addressing himself vaguely to the ‘humanity’ of Germans, so that he is obliged to include even the princes in his admonitions, on the other hand, he finds himself obliged to set up at least one distinction among Germans, for without a distinction there can be no antagonism, and without an antagonism, no materials for political Capuchinian sermons.

Mr Heinzen therefore divides Germans into princes and subjects.

The ‘narrow-minded’ communists see not only the political distinction of prince and subject, but also the social distinction of classes.

It is well known that, shortly after the July Revolution, the victorious bourgeoisie,  [158] in its September laws, made “the incitement of class against class,” probably also out of ‘humanity,’ a criminal offence, to which imprisonment and fines were attached. It is further well known that the English bourgeois newspapers could not denounce the Chartist leaders and Chartist writers more effectively than by reproaching them with setting class against class. It is even notorious that, in consequence of inciting class against class, German writers are incarcerated in fortresses. Is not Mr Heinzen this time talking the language of the French September laws, the English bourgeois newspapers, and the German penal code?

But no. The well-meaning Mr Heinzen only fears that the communists “are seeking to assure the princes a revolutionary Fontanelle.” Thus the Belgian liberals assure us that the radicals are in secret alliance with the catholics; the French liberals assure us that the democrats have an understanding with the legitimists. And the liberal Mr Heinzen assures us that the communists have an understanding with the princes.

As I once pointed out in the Franco-German Annuals, Germany has her own  [159] Christian-Germanic plague. Her bourgeoisie was so retarded in its development that it is beginning its struggle with absolute monarchy and seeking to establish its political power at the moment when in all developed countries the bourgeoisie is already engaged in the most violent struggles with the working class, and when its political illusions are already obsolete so far as the intellect of Europe is concerned.

In this country, where the political poverty of absolute monarchy still exists with a whole appendage of decayed semi-feudal orders and conditions, there exist on the other hand, partly in consequence of the industrial development and Germany’s dependence on the world market, the antagonisms between the bourgeoisie and the working class, and the struggle arising therefrom, an instance of which are the workers’ revolts in Silesia and Bohemia. The German bourgeoisie therefore finds itself in a relation of antagonism to the proletariat before it has yet constituted itself politically as a class. The struggle among the subjects has broken out before ever princes and nobles have been got rid of, in spite of all Hambach songs.

[160] Mr Heinzen does not know how to explain these contradictory relations, which of course are also reflected in German literature, except by putting them on to his opponents’ conscience and interpreting them as the consequence of the counter-revolutionary activities of the communists.

Meanwhile the German workers are quite aware that the absolute monarchy does not and cannot hesitate one moment to greet them with a whiff of grapeshot in the service of the bourgeoisie. Why then should they prefer the direct rule of the bourgeoisie to the brutal oppression of absolute government, with its semi-feudal retinue? The workers know that the bourgeoisie must not only make them wider concessions than absolute monarchy, but that in the interests of its commerce and industry, the bourgeoisie must create against its will the conditions for the unity of the workers, and the unity of the workers is the first requisite for their victory. The workers know that the abolition of bourgeois property relations is not brought about by the maintenance of feudal property relations. They know their own revolutionary movement can only be accelerated through  [161] the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal orders and the absolute monarchy. They know that their own struggle with the bourgeoisie can only break out on the day the bourgeoisie triumphs. In spite of all, they do not share Mr Heinzen’s middle-class illusions. They can and must take part in the middle-class revolution as a condition preliminary to the Labour revolution. But they cannot for a moment regard it as their objective.

That the attitude of the workers is as above described, of this the English Chartists have furnished us with a brilliant example in the recent Anti-Corn Law League movement. Not for a moment did they believe the lies and delusions of the middle-class radicals, not for a moment did they abandon their struggle against the latter, but fully conscious of what they were doing, the Chartists assisted their enemies to triumph over the Tories, and the day after the abolition of the Corn Laws, it was no longer Tories and Free Traders who faced each other at the hustings, but Free Traders and Chartists. And they captured seats in Parliament from these middle-class radicals.

[162] Mr Heinzen understands the middle-class liberals just as little as he understands the workers, however unconsciously he labours in their service. He believes it necessary to repeat to them the old platitudes anent German “laziness” and humility. But the honest man takes quite seriously what are only servile phrases in the mouth of a Camphausen or a Hansemann. The bourgeois gentry will laugh at this simplicity. They know that the mob is bold and aggressive in revolutions. Consequently, the bourgeois gentry try as far as possible to transform the absolute monarchy into a middle-class monarchy by amicable means.

But absolute monarchy in Prussia, as formerly in England and France, does not lend itself to peaceful transformation into a middle-class monarchy. It does not gracefully abdicate. In addition to personal prejudices, the princes are bound hand and foot by a whole civil, military, and parsonic bureaucracy—constituent parts of absolute monarchy which do not by any means desire to exchange their ruling position for a serving position under the bourgeoisie.

On the other hand, the feudal orders hold  [163] aloof, as what is at stake is their existence or non-existence, that is, property or expropriation. It is clear that absolute monarchy, in spite of all the servile homage of the bourgeoisie, perceives its true interest to lie on the side of these orders.

As little, therefore, as the sweet persuasions of a Lally Tollendal, a Mounier, a Malouet, or a Mirabeau could induce a Louis XVI. to cast in his lot with the bourgeoisie, in opposition to the feudalists and the remnants of absolute monarchy, just as little will the siren songs of a Camphausen or a Hansemann convince Friedrich Wilhelm IV.

But Mr Heinzen has no concern either with the bourgeoisie or with the proletariat in Germany. His party is the “party of humanity,” that is the honest and warmhearted enthusiasts who champion middle-class interests under the disguise of “human” objects, without being clear as to the connection of the idealistic phrase with its realistic content.

To his party, the party of man, or the crowd of humanity in Germany, the State builder Karl Heinzen offers the “best republic,” the best republic devised by him, “the federal  [164] republic with social institutions.” Rousseau once sketched the best political world for the Poles and Mably for the Corsicans. The great Genevese citizen has found a still greater successor.

“I submit that just as a flower can only be made out of petals, so a republic can only be composed of republican elements.” A man who knows how to make flowers out of petals, even if it is only a daisy, cannot fail to devise the best republic, whatever an ill-natured world might say.

In spite of all slanderous tongues, the brave state builder takes the example of the Charter of Republican North America. What seems offensive to him, he brushes aside with his common sense. Thus he accomplishes a revised edition—in  usum delphini , that is for the use and edification of “German humanity.” The colossal picture of the world devised by him he has in fact hung up with his own hand on the highest summit of the Swiss Alps.

Cacatum non est pictum , hisses the voice of the “small” impenitent snake. And the republican Ajax angrily lets the communistic Thersites fall to the ground, and blurts out in a deep-throated voice the fearful words:  [165] “You carry the ridiculous too far, Mr Engels!”

And really, Mr Engels? Do you not believe that the American federal system is the best political form which statecraft has so far devised? You shake your head? What? You deny that the American federal system has ever been devised by statecraft at all? And that there are “best political social forms”  in abstracto ? But that is the last straw.

You are shameless enough to point out to us that the honest German who would benefit his true fatherland by conferring on it the North American constitution, beautified and improved, resembles the idiotic merchant who copied the ledgers of his rich rival, and imagined that being in possession of this copy, he had also come into possession of the coveted wealth.

Barbaroux, and other persons who had made much noise in the world, were made shorter by a whole head because they happened to claim the “American federal system” to be the “best political form.” And thus it will befall all other Goliaths to whom it may occur, in the midst of any democratic  [166] revolution in Europe, and especially in still quite feudal and dismembered Germany, to put the “American federal system” in place of the one and indivisible republic and its levelling centralization.

The state-founding Hercules indeed does not copy slavishly the North American federal republic. He decorates it with “social institutions”; he would regulate the property relations “according to rational principles,” and the seven great measures wherewith he would abolish the old bourgeois society are by no means wretched flimsy recipes collected from modern, objectionable communist and socialist cookshops.

To the “Incas” and “Campe’s books for children” the great Karl Heinzen is indebted for his recipe for the “humanizing of society,” just as he is indebted for the latter pompous phrase not to the philosopher and Pomeranian Ruge, but rather to a “Peruvian” grown grey in wisdom. And Mr Engels calls all this arbitrarily-contrived, commonplace enthusiasm for world improvement.

Take for instance any well-meaning citizen and ask him on his conscience: What is the difficulty under which the existing property  [167] relations labour? And the worthy man will place his index finger at the tip of his nose, draw two deep breaths of thought, and then give it out as his opinion, that it is a shame for many to possess “nothing,” not even the most absolute necessities, while others roll in shameless millions, not only to the detriment of the propertyless masses, but also to that of honest citizens.  Aurea mediocritas.  Golden mediocrity, the worthy member of the middle class will exclaim. It is only extremes that should be avoided. What rational state constitution would be compatible with these extremes, these highly objectionable extremes?

And now take a look at the Heinzen “federal republic,” with “social institutions” and seven measures for the “humanizing of society.” There a minimum of property is assured to every citizen, below which he cannot fall, and a maximum of property is prescribed which he must not exceed. Has Mr Heinzen then not solved all difficulties inasmuch as he has repeated in the form of State decrees and thereby realized the pious desire of all worthy citizens, that none should have too little and none too much?

And in the same equally simple and  [168] generous fashion Mr Heinzen solves all the economic problems. He has regulated property according to reasonable principles corresponding to honest cheapness.

And do not raise the objection that the “rational rules” of property are just those “economic laws” on whose cold-blooded necessity all cheap “measures,” whether or not recommended by Incas and Campe’s books for children and held in great esteem by the most sturdy patriots, must come to grief.

How unkind it is to raise economic objections against a man who, unlike others, does not boast of his “studies of political economy,” but has rather out of modesty managed to give the impression in all his works, that he has still to make his first studies in political economy.

Whereas private property is not a simple relation, or even an abstract concept, a principle, but consists in the totality of middle-class production relations—we are concerned here not with subordinate and decaying, but with existing, middle-class private property—whereas all these middle-class productive relations are class relations,  [169] a connection which is obvious to every pupil of Adam Smith or Ricardo—an alteration in these conditions can only be brought about by an alteration of these classes in their reciprocal connection, and an alteration in the position of classes is—a historical change, a product of the total social activity, the product of a specific “historical movement.”

For example, in order to explain the abolition of middle-class property relations, modern historians would have to describe the movement in which the bourgeoisie progressed to the point where it had developed its conditions of life far enough to be able to abolish the whole of the feudal orders and the feudal mode of existence, and consequently the feudal relations of production within which these feudal orders had been producing. The abolition of feudal property relations and the foundation of modern middle-class society was therefore not the result of a certain action which proceeded from a particular theoretical principle pressed to its logical conclusion. The principles and theories which the writers of the bourgeoisie put forward during the latter’s struggle with feudalism were rather nothing but the theoretical expression of the practical  [170] movement. How this expression was more or less Utopian, dogmatic, or doctrinaire, according as it related to a more or less developed phase of the real movement can be clearly traced.

Just as the first critical moves in every science are necessarily entangled in the assumptions of the science which they are intending to combat, so Proudhon’s work  Qu’est ce que la propriété?  is a criticism of political economy from the standpoint of political economy. Since the criticism of political economy forms the chief subject of interest, we need not here examine the legal section of the book, which criticizes law from the standpoint of law. Proudhon’s book is therefore scientifically surpassed by the critical school of political economy, even of political economy as conceived by Proudhon. This work of criticism was only rendered possible by Proudhon himself, just as Proudhon’s criticism had as its antecedents the criticism of the mercantile system by the physiocrats, that of the physiocrats by Adam Smith, that of Adam Smith by Ricardo, as well as the labours of Fourier and Saint-Simon.

[172] All the developments of political economy have private property as their major premise. This fundamental assumption is regarded by it as an unassailable fact, which needs no demonstration, and about which it only chances to speak casually, as M. Say naïvely confesses.

Now Proudhon subjects private property, the basis of political economy, to a critical examination, which is in fact the first decisive, ruthless, and at the same time scientific analysis. This constitutes the great scientific progress which he made, a progress which revolutionized political economy, and first rendered possible a real science of political economy.

Proudhon’s work  Qu’est ce que la propriété?  has the same significance for modern political economy as Siéyès’ pamphlet:  Qu’est ce que le tiers état?  has for modern politics.

If Proudhon did not conceive the various forms of private property, as, for example, wages, trade, value, price, money, etc., as such, but used these forms of political economy as weapons against political economy, this was quite in accordance with his whole standpoint, as above described and historically justified.

Political economy, which accepts the  [173] relationships of private property as human and reasonable relationships, moves in a perpetual contradiction to its fundamental assumption, which is private property, a contradiction analogous to that of theology, which constantly gives a human interpretation to religious ideas, and thereby constantly violates its fundamental assumption, which is the supramundane character of religion. Thus in political economy wages appear at the outset as labour’s proportionate share in the product. Wages and the profit of capital exist in the most friendly and apparently human relations, alternately assisting each other. Subsequently it transpired that they stand in the most hostile, in an inverted, relationship towards each other. In the beginning value is apparently determined on rational principles, by the costs of production of an article and by its social utility. Subsequently it transpires that value is a purely accidental determination, which does not need to have any connection at all either with the costs of production or with social utility. The magnitude of wages is in the beginning determined by a free contract between the free worker and the free capitalist. Subsequently it transpires that the worker is  [174] compelled to let it be determined, just as the capitalist is compelled to fix it as low as possible. Coercion takes the place of the freedom of the contracting parties. The same observation applies to trade and all the other relations of political economy. Political economists occasionally have an intimation of these contradictions, the development of which forms the principal content of their mutual wrangling. When, however, they become fully aware of them, they proceed to attack private property in one of its partial manifestations, as the falsifier of wages which are rational in themselves, that is, in the ideas they have formed about wages; or of value that is rational in itself, or of commerce that is rational in itself. Thus Adam Smith occasionally attacks the capitalists, Destutt de Tracy attacks the money-changers, Simonde de Sismondi attacks the factory system, Ricardo attacks landed property, and thus almost all political economists attack the non-industrial capitalists who regard property merely as consumable goods.

Sometimes, therefore, the political economists invest economic conditions with a human semblance, that is, when they are attacking  [175] a particular abuse, but at other times, which is mostly the case, they interpret these conditions in their strict economic meaning, as distinguished from human conditions. They reel unconsciously in this contradiction.

Now Proudhon has made an end once for all of this unconsciousness. He took seriously the human semblance given to economic conditions and sharply confronted it with their inhuman reality. In all seriousness he accepted the human gloss which the political economists had put upon economic conditions, and sharply compared it with their inhuman reality. He demanded that these conditions should be in reality what they are in fancy. In other words, the ideas which have been formed of them should be abandoned and their veritable inhumanity should be acknowledged. He was therefore consistent in plainly representing private property in its most universal aspect to be the falsifier of economic relationships, and not this or that kind of private property, to a partial degree, as did most of the other political economists. He achieved everything that could be achieved by the criticism of political economy from the standpoint of political economy.

[176] All political economy hitherto has taken as its starting-point the wealth which the movement of private property ostensibly creates for the nations, in order to reach its conclusions in support of private property.

Proudhon starts out from the reverse side, which is sophistically covered up in political economy, that is, from the poverty created by the movement of private property, in order to reach his conclusions, which are unfavourable to private poverty. The first criticism of private property was naturally prompted by the phenomenon which embodies its essence in the most striking and clamorous form, a form which directly violates human feeling—by the phenomenon of poverty.

The critics of Proudhon cannot deny that Proudhon also perceives an inner connection between the facts of poverty and of property, as he proposes to abolish property on account of this connection, in order to abolish poverty. Proudhon has done even more. He has demonstrated in detail how the movement of capital creates poverty. The critics of Proudhon, on the other hand, will not enter into such trivialities. They  [177] perceive only that poverty and private property are opposites: which is fairly obvious.

Proletariat and wealth are antitheses. As such they constitute a whole; both are manifestations of the world of private property. The question to be considered is the specific position which both occupy in the antithesis. To describe them as two sides of a whole is not a sufficient explanation. Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to preserve its own existence, and along with it that of its antithesis, the proletariat. Private property satisfied in itself is the positive side of the antithesis. The proletariat, on the other hand, is obliged, as proletariat, to abolish itself, and along with it private property, its conditioned antithesis, which makes it the proletariat.

It is a negative side of the antithesis, the internal source of unrest, the disintegrated and disintegrating proletariat.

The possessing class and the proletarian class represent the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels perfectly satisfied with this self-estrangement, knowing that in this estrangement resides its own power, and possesses therein the semblance  [178] of a human existence; the latter class feels itself to be destroyed by the estrangement, perceives therein its impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.

Within the antithesis, therefore, the owner of private property is the conservative, and the proletarian is the destructive party. From the former proceeds the action of maintaining the antithesis, from the latter the action of destroying it. From the point of view of its national, economic movement, private property is, of course, continually being driven towards its own dissolution, but only by an unconscious development which is independent of it, and which exists against its will, and is limited by the nature of things; only, that is, by creating the proletariat as proletariat, poverty conscious of its own physical and spiritual poverty, and demoralized humanity conscious of its own demoralization and consequently striving against it.

The proletariat fulfils the judgment which private property by the creation of the proletariat suspends over itself, just as it fulfils the judgment which wage-labour suspends over itself in creating alien riches and its own condemnation. If the proletariat triumphs,  [179] it does not thereby become the absolute side of society, for it triumphs only by abolishing itself and its opposite. In this way both the proletariat and its conditioned opposite, private property, are done away with.

FRENCH MATERIALISM

The French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and especially of French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and against the existing religion and theology, but equally an open and outspoken campaign against all metaphysics, especially that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. Metaphysics was confronted with philosophy, just as Feuerbach, in his first decisive stand against Hegel, opposed sober philosophy to drunken speculation. The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, which was driven from the field by the French Enlightenment, and especially by the French materialism, of the eighteenth century, experienced its victorious and opulent restoration in the German philosophy, and particularly in the speculative German philosophy, of the nineteenth century.

After Hegel had combined it in an ingenious manner with all subsequent metaphysics and  [181] with German idealism, and founded a universal realm of metaphysics, the attack on speculative metaphysics and on all metaphysics was once again synonymous, as in the eighteenth century, with an attack on theology. Metaphysics succumbed for good and all to materialism, which itself was now perfected by the work of speculation and coincided with humanism.

French and English socialism and communism represented the materialism which coincided with humanism in the practical sphere, just as Feuerbach represented it in the theoretical sphere.

There are two tendencies of French materialism, one of which derives its origin from Descartes and the other from Locke. The latter is pre-eminently an element in French culture and merges directly into socialism. The former, viz., the mechanical materialism, is absorbed in French natural science. The French materialism which derives directly from Descartes does not concern us particularly, any more than the French school of Newton and French natural science generally.

Only this much need be said. In his physics Descartes invested matter with self-creative power, and he conceived mechanical  [182] movement to be its vital act. He separated his physics completely from his metaphysics. Within his physics matter is the only substance, the only basis of being and perceiving.

Mechanical French materialism absorbed the physics of Descartes, while rejecting his metaphysics. His pupils were anti-metaphysicians by profession, that is to say, they were physicians.

This school commences with the doctor Leroy, and reaches its acme with the doctor Cabanis, while the doctor Lamettrie is its centre. Descartes was still living when Leroy transferred to the human soul the Cartesian construction of animals, and explained the soul as a mode of the body and ideas as mechanical movements, similarly to Lamettrie in the eighteenth century. Leroy even believed that Descartes had dissembled his real opinion. Descartes protested. At the end of the eighteenth century Cabanis perfected Cartesian materialism in a work entitled: Rapport du physic et du moral de l’homme .

Cartesian materialism exists in France even to this day. It had its great success in mechanical natural science, with which Romanticism will least of all be reproached.

[183] The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, as specially represented for France by Descartes, had materialism for its antagonist from its hour of birth. In person this antagonist confronted Descartes in the shape of Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurean materialism. French and English materialism always remain in close relationship with Democritus and Epicurus.

Cartesian metaphysics found another antagonist in the English materialist Hobbes. Long after their death, Gassendi and Hobbes triumphed over their opponent at the moment when the former reigned in all the schools of France as the official power.

Voltaire once remarked that the indifference of Frenchmen in the eighteenth century towards Jesuitical and Jansenist quarrels was brought about less by philosophy than by Law’s financial speculations. Thus the overthrow of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century can be explained from the materialistic theory of the eighteenth century only in so far as this theoretical movement is itself explicable by the practical shape of the French life of that time. This life was directed to the immediate present, to worldly enjoyment and  [184] worldly interests, to the secular world. It was inevitable that anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialistic theories should correspond to its anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, its materialistic practice. In practice metaphysics had lost all credit. Here we have only to indicate briefly the course of the theoretical movement.

In the seventeenth century metaphysics had already been provided with a positive, a profane content ( pace  Descartes, Leibnitz etc.). It made discoveries in mathematics, physics, and other definite sciences which appeared to belong to it, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century this semblance had been destroyed. The positive sciences had broken away from it and mapped out their own territory. The whole metaphysical realm consisted in nothing more than creatures of fancy and heavenly things at the precise time when real beings and earthly things were beginning to concentrate all interest upon themselves. Metaphysics had become stale. Helvetius and Condillac were born in the same year that Malebranche and Arnauld, the last great French metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, died.

[185] The man who theoretically destroyed the credit of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century and all metaphysics generally was Pierre Bayle. His weapon was scepticism, forged out of the magic formulas of metaphysics itself. He took Cartesian metaphysics as his immediate starting-point. Just as Feuerbach in combating speculative theology was driven to combat speculative philosophy, because he perceived in speculation the last support of theology, because he had to force the theologians to retreat from fictitious science to crude, repugnant faith, so religious doubt drove Bayle into doubts of the metaphysics which supported this faith. Consequently he subjected metaphysics in its entire historical evolution to criticism. He became its historian in order to write the history of its death. Above all he refuted Spinoza and Leibnitz.

Pierre Bayle not only prepared the way for the acceptance in France of the materialism and philosophy of healthy common science through the sceptical disintegration of metaphysics. He announced the atheistic society which was soon to come into existence, inasmuch as a society of avowed atheists could  [186] exist, as an atheist could be an honest man, as man was not degraded by atheism, but by superstition and idolatry.

In the words of a French writer, Pierre Bayle was “the last metaphysician in the sense of the seventeenth and the first philosopher in the sense of the eighteenth century.”

In addition to the negative refutation of the theology and metaphysics of the seventeenth century, a positive, anti-metaphysical system was required. A book was wanted which would systematize the practical activities of that time and provide them with a theoretical foundation. Locke’s essay on the “Origin of the Human Understanding” came as if summoned from beyond the Channel. It was greeted enthusiastically as an anxiously awaited guest.

It may be asked: Is Locke perchance a pupil of Spinoza? We would answer. Materialism is the native son of Great Britain. Already her schoolman Duns Scotus asked “whether matter could not think?”

In order to work this miracle, he took refuge in God’s omnipotence, that is, he made theology itself preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist. Nominalism is found to be  [187] a chief ingredient among English materialists, just as it is the first expression of materialism generally.

The real progenitor of English materialism and of all modern experimental science is Bacon. Natural science was regarded by him as the true science, and physics as the principal part of natural science. Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriæ, Democritus and his atoms, are frequently quoted as his authorities. According to his doctrine, the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is based upon experience and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the chief instruments of such a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter movement is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical movement, but even more as an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension, as a qual (a torture)—to use an expression of Jacob Bohme’s—of matter.

In Bacon, as its first creator, materialism still conceals within itself in an ingenuous manner the germs of a many-sided  [188] development. On the one hand, the sensuous poetic glamour in which matter is bathed entices the whole personality of man. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine swarms with theological inconsistencies.

In its further development, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic bloom, and Becomes the abstract experience of the mathematician. The physical movement is sacrificed to the mechanical or mathematical; geometry is proclaimed as the chief science. Materialism takes to misanthropy. In order to overcome misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism on the latter’s own ground, materialism must mortify its own flesh and turn ascetic. It reappears as an intellectual entity, but it also develops all the ruthless consistency of the intellect.

Hobbes, as Bacon’s continuator, argues that if the senses furnish men with all knowledge, then concepts and ideas are nothing but phantoms of the material world more or less divested of their sensual forms. All philosophy can do is to give these phantoms names. One name may be applied to several  [189] phantoms. There may even be names of names. It would, however, imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we contended that all ideas had their origin in the world of senses, and, on the other hand, that a word was worth more than a word; that besides the individual beings known to us by our senses, there existed also beings of a general nature. An immaterial substance is rather the same absurdity as an immaterial body. Bodies, being, substance are but different terms for the same reality. One cannot separate thought from matter that thinks. It is the substratum of all changes. The word infinite is meaningless unless it signifies the capacity of our minds to perform an endless process of addition. As only material things are perceptible and knowable, nothing can be known about the existence of God.

My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement which has a beginning or an end. The objects of impulse are what are called good. Man is subject to the same laws of Nature. Power and freedom are identical.

Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, providing any firmer basis for the  [190] latter’s fundamental principle, the origin of all knowledge and ideas from the world of the senses.

It was Locke who established the principle of Bacon and Hobbes in his Essay on the Human Understanding.

Just as Hobbes shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism, so Collins, Dodwall, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, etc. broke down the last theological bars which still obstructed Locke’s sensationalism. At least for materialists, theism became nothing more than a convenient and easy-going way of getting rid of religion.

We have already noticed at what an opportune time Locke’s work came to the French. Locke had established the philosophy of  bon sens , of healthy common sense, that is, to express it in a roundabout way, that there are no philosophers other than those of the understanding which is based upon the healthy human senses.

Condillac, who was Locke’s immediate pupil and French interpreter, lost no time in turning the Lockeian sensationalism upon the metaphysics of the seventeenth century. He contended that the French had rightly spurned  [191] the latter as a clumsy product of the imagination and theological prejudice.

He published a refutation of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Malebranche. In his work:  L’essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines , he developed Locke’s ideas and contended that not only the soul, but also the senses, not only the art of fashioning ideas, but also the apparatus of sensual receptivity, are subjects of experience and usage. Consequently, the entire development of man depends upon education and external circumstances. Condillac was only supplanted in the French schools by the eclectic philosophy.

The difference between French and English materialism is the difference between the two nationalities. The French endowed English materialism with wit, with flesh and blood, with eloquence. They invested it with grace and gave it the temperament that was still lacking. They civilized it.

In Helvetius, who likewise took Locke as his starting point, materialism receives its proper French character. He applied it immediately to social life. (Helvetius,  de l’homme .) Sensual qualities and egoism,  [192] enjoyment and enlightened self-interests are the foundations of all morality.

The natural equality of human intelligences, the harmony between the progress of reason and the progress of industry, the natural goodness of mankind, the omnipotence of education are the principal factors in this system.

The writings of Lamettrie exhibit the union of Cartesian and English materialism. Lamettrie utilizes the physics of Descartes down to its utmost detail. His  l’homme machine  is a performance executed on the model of the animal machine of Descartes. In Holbach’s  Système de la nature , the section devoted to physics likewise consists of the synthesis of English and French materialism, just as the section devoted to morals is based essentially on the morality of Helvetius. Robinet ( de la nature ), the French materialist who more than all the others kept in touch with metaphysics, expressly founds himself on Leibnitz.

Of Volney, Dupuis, Diderot, etc., we do not need to speak any more than of the physiocrats, now that we have shown the double derivation of French materialism from the  [193] physics of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibnitz. This antagonism could only be realized by Germans after they themselves had come into conflict with speculative metaphysics.

Just as Cartesian materialism branches into natural science, so the other tendency of French materialism merges directly into socialism and communism.

No special acuteness is required to perceive the necessary connection of the original goodness and equally intelligent endowment of men, of the omnipotence of experience, custom and education, the influence of external circumstances on men, the extreme importance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., with communism and socialism.

If man receives all his impressions and forms all his conceptions from the world of sense, and derives his experiences from the world of sense, it follows that the empirical world ought to be so constructed as to offer a wealth of truly human experiences. If enlightened self-interest is the principle of all morality, it follows that the private interests of men ought to coincide with human interests. If man is not free in the materialistic sense,  [194] that is to say, is free, not by reason of his negative strength to avoid this and that, but by reason of his positive strength to assert his true individuality, then man must not punish the crimes of individuals, but destroy the anti-social breeding-places of crime, and afford to each person sufficient social scope for the expression of his or her individuality. If man is formed by circumstances, then it is only in society that he develops his real nature, and the strength of his nature must be measured, not with the strength of the isolated individual, but with the strength of society.

These and similar sentences may be found almost word for word in the writings even of the oldest French materialists. This is not the place to criticize them. Significant of the socialist tendency of materialism is Mandeville’s (one of the older English pupils of Locke) apology for vice. He shows that vice is indispensable and useful in present-day society. This, however, was no justification for present-day society.

The doctrines of French materialism form the starting-point of Fourier. The followers of Babeuf were crude, uncivilized materialists,  [195] but even fully-developed communism derived directly from French materialism.

The latter, in the shape given it by Helvetius, returned to its motherland, to England. On the morality of Helvetius, Bentham founded his system of enlightened self-interest, just as Owen, proceeding from Bentham’s system, founded English communism. On being banished to England, the Frenchman Cabet was stimulated by the communistic ideas he found there, and returned to France, to become the most popular, albeit most superficial, representative of communism here.

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

Pourquoi la revolution d’Angleterre a-t-elle reussi. Discours sur l’histoire de la revolution d’Angleterre, Paris, 1850.[10]

The object of M. Guizot’s pamphlet is to show why Louis Philippe and Guizot’s policy ought not to have been overthrown on the 24th February 1848, and how the reprehensible character of the French is to blame for the fact that the July monarchy of 1830 ignominiously collapsed after eighteen years of laborious existence and was not blessed with the security of tenure enjoyed by the English monarchy since 1688.

From this pamphlet it may be seen how even the ablest individuals of the  ancien régime , how even people who in their own way are not devoid of historical talent have been so completely thrown off their balance by the fatal event of February (1848) as to have lost all historical comprehension, even  [197] the comprehension of their former behaviour. Instead of being impelled by the February Revolution to study more closely the wholly different historical conditions, and the wholly different positions occupied respectively by the various classes of society in the French monarchy of 1830 and in the English monarchy of 1688, M. Guizot gets rid of the entire difference between the two situations in a few moral phrases and asserts in conclusion that the policy overthrown on the 24th February “can alone master revolutions, as it can sustain States.”

The question which M. Guizot professes to answer may be precisely formulated as follows: Why has middle-class society developed in England under the form of a constitutional monarchy for a longer period than in France?

The following passage serves to show the nature of M. Guizot’s acquaintance with the course of middle-class development in England: “Under the reigns of George I and George II, public opinion veered in another direction; foreign policy ceased to be its chief concern; internal administration, the maintenance of peace, questions of finance, of the colonies, of trade, the development and the struggles of  [198] the parliamentary régime, became the dominant preoccupations of the Government and of the public” (p. 168).

M. Guizot discovers only two factors in the reign of William III that are worthy of mention: the maintenance of the equilibrium between Parliament and the Crown, and the maintenance of the European equilibrium by means of the struggle against Louis XIV. Under the Hanoverian dynasty, public opinion suddenly “veered in another direction,” nobody knows how and why.

It is obvious that M. Guizot has applied the most banal platitudes of French parliamentary debate to English history, believing he has thereby explained it. Similarly, when he was Minister, M. Guizot imagined he was balancing on his shoulders the pole of equilibrium between Parliament and the Crown, whereas in reality he was only jobbing the whole of the French State and the whole of French society bit by bit to the Jewish financiers of the Paris Bourse.

M. Guizot does not think it worth the trouble to mention that the wars against Louis XIV were purely wars of competition for the destruction of French commerce and of French  [199] sea power; that under William III, the rule of the financial middle class received its first sanction through the establishment of the Bank of England, and the introduction of the national debt; that a new upward impetus was given to the manufacturing middle class through the consistent enforcement of the protective fiscal system.

For him only political phrases have importance. He does not even mention that under Queen Anne the ruling parties could only maintain themselves and the constitutional monarchy by forcibly prolonging the life of Parliament to seven years, thus almost entirely destroying popular influence over the government.

Under the Hanoverian dynasty England had already progressed so far as to be able to wage competitive war against France in the modern form. England herself combated France only in America and the East Indies, whilst on the Continent she was content to pay foreign princes like Frederick II to wage war against France. When, therefore, foreign politics assumed another aspect, M. Guizot says: “foreign policy ceased to be a chief concern” and its place was taken by “the  [200] maintenance of peace.” The extent to which “the development and the struggles of the parliamentary régime became the dominant preoccupation of the Government and of the public” may be inferred from the bribery stories about the Walpole ministry, which at any rate bear a close resemblance to the scandals which came to light under M. Guizot.

Why the English Revolution entered on a more prosperous career than the French Revolution subsequently did is explained by M. Guizot from two causes: first, from the fact that the English Revolution bore a thoroughly religious character, and therefore broke in no way with the traditions of the past, and secondly from the fact that from the outset it did not wear a destructive, but a constructive aspect, Parliament defending the old existing laws against the encroachments of the Crown.

As regards the first point, M. Guizot forgets that the free thought of the French Revolution, which makes him shudder so convulsively, was imported into France from no other country than England. Locke was its father, and in Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke it assumed that  [201] lively form which later underwent such a brilliant development in France.

Thus we reach the strange result that the same free thought upon which, according to M. Guizot, the French Revolution came to grief was one of the most essential products of the religious English Revolution.

With respect to the second point, M. Guizot forgets that at the outset the French Revolution was just as conservative as the English, if not more so. Absolutism, especially in the guise which it had latterly assumed in France, was an innovation even there, and against this innovation the parliaments arose and defended the old laws, the  us et coutumes  of the old estates-of-the-realm monarchy. And whereas the first step of the French Revolution was the revival of the Estates General which had been extinct since Henry IV and Louis XIII, the English Revolution has no feature of an equally classical conservative nature to exhibit.

According to M. Guizot, the chief result of the English Revolution was this, that it was made impossible for the king to govern against the will of Parliament and of the House of Commons in Parliament. The  [202] entire revolution may be summed up by saying that at the commencement both sides, the Crown and Parliament, overstepped their limits and went too far until under William III they reached the proper equilibrium and neutralized each other. That the subjection of the monarchy was its subjection to the rule of a class M. Guizot deems it superfluous to mention.

Consequently, he does not feel it incumbent on him to ascertain how this class acquired the power necessary to make the Crown its servant. He appears to think that the whole struggle between Charles I and Parliament related to purely political privileges. For what purpose Parliament and the class represented therein needed these privileges we are not told. Neither does M. Guizot refer to the direct interferences of Charles I with free competition, which rendered the commerce and the trade of England increasingly impossible; or the dependence upon Parliament into which Charles fell ever more hopelessly, through his continuous financial distress, the more he tried to defy Parliament. According to M. Guizot, therefore, the whole Revolution is to be explained by the evil intent and  [203] religious fanaticism of a few disturbers of the peace who could not content themselves with a moderate freedom. M. Guizot has just as little enlightenment to furnish with regard to the connection of the religious movement with the development of middle-class society. Of course, the Republic was likewise the mere work of a number of ambitious, fanatical, and malevolent spirits. That simultaneously efforts were being made to introduce the Republic in Lisbon, Naples, and Messina, as in England, under the influence of the Dutch example, is a fact which is not mentioned at all.

Although M. Guizot never loses sight of the French Revolution, it does not occur to him that the transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy is everywhere effected only after violent struggles and after passing through the stage of the Republic, and that even then, the old dynasty, being useless, must give way to a usurping collateral branch. Consequently, he has nothing but the most trivial commonplaces to utter respecting the overthrow of the English restored monarchy. He does not even cite the proximate causes: the fears entertained by the great new landowners, who  [204] had been created by the Reformation, at the prospect of restoration of Catholicism, when they would have been obliged to surrender all the former Church property which had been stolen, which meant that the ownership of seven-tenths of the entire soil of England would have changed hands; the horror of the trading and industrial middle class at Catholicism, which by no means suited its commerce; the nonchalance with which the Stuarts had sold, for their own advantage and that of the Court nobility, the whole of English industry and commerce, that is, had sold their own country, to the Government of France, which was then maintaining a very dangerous, and in many respects, successful competition with the English.

As M. Guizot everywhere leaves out the most important factors, there is nothing for him to do but to present an extremely inadequate and banal narration of merely political events.

The great riddle for M. Guizot, which he can only solve by pointing to the superior intelligence of the English, the riddle of the conservative character of the English Revolution, is explained by the continuous alliance  [205] which united the middle class with the largest section of the great landowners, an alliance that essentially distinguishes the English Revolution from the French Revolution, which destroyed large landed property by parcelling out the soil. This class of large landowners, which had originated under Henry VIII, unlike the French feudal land-ownership in 1789, did not find itself in conflict but rather in complete harmony with the conditions of life of the bourgeoisie. Its land-ownership, in fact, was not feudal, but middle class. On the one hand, it placed at the disposal of the middle class the necessary population to carry on manufactures, and on the other hand, it was able to impart to agriculture a development which corresponded to the state of industry and of commerce. Hence its common interests with the middle class, hence its alliance with the latter.

With the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy in England, English history comes to a full stop, as far as M. Guizot is concerned. All that follows is for him confined to a pleasant sea-saw between Tories and Whigs, and this means the great debate between M. Guizot and M. Thiers.

[206] In reality, however, the colossal development and transformation of commercial society in England began with the consolidation of the English monarchy. Where M. Guizot sees only soft repose and idyllic peace, the most violent conflicts, the most drastic revolutions, were in reality developing. First of all, under the constitutional monarchy manufactures underwent an expansion hitherto undreamed of, in order then to make way for the great industry, the steam-engine, and the gigantic factories. Whole classes of the population disappeared, new classes took their place, with new conditions of life and new needs. A large new middle class emerged; while the old bourgeoisie fought the French Revolution, the new captured the world market. It became so all-powerful that even before the Reform Act placed political power directly in its hands, it had compelled its opponents to legislate almost solely in its interests and according to its needs. It captured direct representation in Parliament and utilized it for the destruction of the last vestiges of real power which remained to landed property. Lastly, it is at this moment engaged in razing to the ground the splendid structure of the  [207] English constitution before which M. Guizot stands in admiration.

And while M. Guizot congratulates the English that among them the noxious growths of French social life, republicanism and socialism, have not undermined the foundation pillars of the unique all-blessing monarchy, the class antagonisms in English society have been developing to a point that is without example in any other country. A middle class without rival in wealth and productive forces confronts a proletariat which is likewise without rival in power and concentration. The tribute which M. Guizot pays to England finally resolves itself into this: that there under the protection of the constitutional monarchy the elements making for social revolution have developed to a far greater extent than in all the other countries of the world put together.

When the threads of English development get entangled in a knot, which he seemingly can no longer cut by more political phrases, M. Guizot takes refuge in religious phrases, in the armed intervention of God. Thus the spirit of God suddenly comes over the Army and prevents Cromwell from proclaiming  [208] himself king, etc. M. Guizot saves himself from his conscience through God, and from the profane public through his style.

In fact, it is not merely a case of  les rois s’en vont , but also of  les capacités de la bourgeoisie s’en vont .

[10] Why the English Revolution was successful. A lecture on the history of the English Revolution, Paris, 1850.

ith ‘which’

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0082VS2FO
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 12, 2012
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 162 KB
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About the author

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he believed socialism would, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism. This would emerge after a transitional period called the "dictatorship of the proletariat": a period sometimes referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy". In section one of The Communist Manifesto Marx describes feudalism, capitalism, and the role internal social contradictions play in the historical process: We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged...the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes.... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring order into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socio-economic change.

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Karl Marx, Essay Example

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Marx on Alienation in Labour and Life

According to the works of Marx he considered that the concept of alienation was a direct result of capitalism. He based this upon empirical research and observation of workers involved in the productive lifecycle. He stated that the workers are deprived of the right of self-determination in their actions and the character of such actions. As such they become mere actors playing out their role in life. He believes they become directed by the bourgeoisie in order to satisfy their goals and objectives a manipulation to maximise the degree of output and profit from individual workers. The concept of alienation occurs because in a capitalist society the worker lacks freedom of expression and can only function through a production system which is not a collective but privately owned and as such the worker merely becomes an instrument honed to achieve that specific goal.

Marx felt that capitalism was an economic system that was constantly crisis prone and did little to benefit the social aspects of mankind. Marx stated that the relationship that is built between wages, labour and capital determines the complete character of the capitalist system. Everyone who is either rich or poor has the right to purchase bread at a certain price. Marx however by analysing the underlying concepts of production was able to expose the class contradictions under such assumptions, which go ignored by concepts of capitalism. (Easterling).

Form of Exploitation and Domination

Marxism that was formed in the 19 th Century was supposed to be a form of socialism that would eliminate exploitation and domination. Essentially a social revolution of new ideas that advocated against the exploitation of the capitalist economic system. Marx stood for the rights and ascension of the working class in a power struggle for recognition. Exploitation was seen as the bosses subjugating the workers in order to carry out their demands with the objective of creating wealth or money. In doing so they eroded the dignity of the worker and treated him merely as a simple economic unit with the objective of making money at the workers expense. Domination was the power that the bosses had over the workers in terms of the job and reward system. Much of this thought process was brought about by the socio economic conditions in 19 th Century Russia and a class system that denigrated the worker or working class.

Marx saw the central conflict in society between the property owners who were the masters and those without property who were the serfs that created a feudal society. i.e. one of Lord and Master to Servant relationship.

Marx refers to the systematic misrepresentation that occurs in the dominant social relations and consciousness of subordinate classes. This being the so termed ‘ false consciousness’ and the workings of a subordinate class structure. Marx illustrated the social order of class by a person’s status relative to owning property and as such the rights and privileges that are attached to such status.

Womens Rights and Work

Modern perspectives – There is more a collective consciousness that was born from feminist movements in the 1960’s and 1970’s where a group of women talked openly, developing a mode of inquiry that challenged the conventional norms of research. These women collectively became known as feminists and enlightened individuals that formed a new basis for knowledge. Although the original works were conducted outside of an academic setting, it soon became apparent that there was a lack of feminine representation in mainstream sociology or social science. Over the last 25 years female sociologists have made significant advances in pushing back the prejudices against women and in general interpreting the workings of society. Feminism was essentially born from a movement and a belief in resolving gender inequalities.

Within the general claims to male dominance in social theory, three challenges have emerged (i) the criticism against that of female knowledge and its’ inability to demonstrate adequate work that illustrates scientific or unbiased knowledge. This resulted in feminists coming under scrutiny in order to demonstrate abilities to rationalise knowledge, perform verification, subjectivity and freedom from political bias. Secondly, how different influences shaped women’s lives. The danger here is one of stereotyping and simply branding women as one gender that provides a uniform result. The third challenge intertwines that of knowledge and gender whereby in essence women are taken for granted. Since 1993 this has caused feminists to re-evaluate the position and rewrite much of the subject matter.

It was Marx who took up the subject of the oppression of women and subjugation of their rights but it was Engels who later championed this cause and gave it more social dominance. Marx used this more in the context of reinforcing points on class distinction.

Marx is correct in his historical rendition that capitalism was largely formed by violence and plunder. He was largely referring to the conquest of the Americas and the accumulation of wealth by conquest and plundering these nations of gold and silver. He equally referred to the slave trade from Africa and the exploitation of India as all pointers that heralded the dawn of capitalism. This concept of greed he considers to be a throwback to more primitive days of asset acquisition at the expense of people who could be subjugated and exploited by the powerful and the wealthy. This is perhaps a barbed reference to the capitalistic nations of Europe at this time.

Works Cited

EASTERLING, STUART. Marx’s theory of economic crisis . 3 2003. http://www.isreview.org/issues/32/crisis_theory.shtml. 2 4 2012.

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