Marx, Karl (1818–1883)

Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany. He studied law at the University of Bonn and then philosophy at the University of Berlin. He was an economist, historian, social and political philosopher, and a revolutionary communist. Along with other revolutionaries such as Mikhail Bakhtin and his friend and benefactor Friedrich Engels, he established the International Working Men's Association in 1864. He became a journalist and editor for the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette) and the Deutsch-französische Jahrbucher (the German-French Annals). However, his writings attracted the attention of the Prussian authorities who subsequently issued a warrant for his arrest, which meant he had to move a number of times back and forth between Germany, Belgium, and France until finally settling in England in 1849, where he thought and hoped the communist revolution would occur.

Marx was a materialist who employed a dialectical method of inquiry. The dialectical materialist critique in his work is derived from the development and transformation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's idealist conception of history. Therefore, his critical focus was on studying the patterns and dynamics of the economy and how throughout history they had shaped the social order. Employing a materialist perspective meant that Marx considered consumer culture to be merely an ideological corollary that corresponds to a society's particular stage of economic development (mode of production). Marx and Engels presented a concise summary of the material dynamics of history in The Communist Manifesto. They suggest that economic progress is an unstoppable force, that there is a relentless unfolding of the economic epochal stages that societies have and will move through: feudalism, capitalism, a transitory socialism, and ultimately communism. Marx argued that the mode of production determines all social relationships and the culture of a society. Therefore, production rather than consumption is the basis of the social order. Moreover, production is the starting point of all economic processes whereas consumption is the end, at which point the whole process starts again.

The famous preface in Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy explains how Marx considered the economy to be the central determinant of cultural, social, and political life. When he outlines the economic base and superstructure dynamic, he claims the economic base is dominant since it shapes and structures social life, including consciousness and cultural activity:

Indeed, consumer culture and desire find meaning and articulation through the ideological and institutional arrangements of the superstructure. Furthermore, Marx claimed that the capitalist mode of production had given rise to a consumer culture rooted in bourgeois

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