Marxism, Geography and

Karl Marx and his Worldview

One of the most widely influential figures in world intellectual history, Marx studied Greek philosophy for his PhD at the University of Berlin in Germany, then moved to Paris in 1843, where he met his lifelong friend and coauthor, Friedrich Engels; in 1845 he moved to Brussels, then back to Paris in 1849, and then shifted to London in 1852, where he worked briefly as a journalist for the New York Tribune. He was active politically [Page 1860]in the International Workingmen's Association (also known as the First International) and wrote on behalf of workers’ movements. Marx's major works include Das Kapital (three volumes), The Communist Manifesto, and Grundrisse (Outline of a Critique of Political Economy). Marx and his ideas were clearly products of their times, that is, 19th-century Europe (especially Britain) amid the Industrial Revolution.

Marx was heavily influenced by three strains of European social thought, particularly German idealism, British political economy, and French utopian socialism. From Georg Hegel, whose works affected Marx enormously, he acquired a deep appreciation of dialectics, a sense of science as the holistic study of relations among phenomena, and a conception of the important role of human consciousness in structuring and changing social life. From French scholars such as Condorcet, Charles Fourier, and Comte de Saint-Simon, Marx incorporated the view that social relations were open, contingent, and subject to change. Later, however, Marx's early idealism is often held to have given way to a more materialist analysis, in which the forces and relations of production were preeminent. Finally, from British political economy, particularly the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx learned the tools with which he dissected capitalism, including the labor theory of value.

There are multiple foundations of Marxist thought. Most centrally, Marxism is often equated with historical materialism, an attempt to make history into a science. Marxism is resolutely historical in focus, emphatically emphasizing that events, people, and ideas must always be situated within their historical context; thus, when things happen is critical to how they happen, for different societies produce different contexts. Departing radically from Hegel, who was known for his idealistic view of history, Marxism stresses that ideas originate from social and material circumstances, not vice versa; matter has primacy over consciousness In effect, Marx “turned Hegel upon his head.” Notably, historical materialism lacked a real sense of spatiality (i.e., there was, originally, no geographical materialism), and Marx himself said little about geography other than occasional references to the division between towns and the countryside.

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