Marxism, Geography and

As a political philosophy and as a framework for understanding how society works, Marxism has its origins in the theories of Karl Marx (1818–1883), a German exile who lived much of his adult life in Britain. Marx can fairly be described as a philosopher, an economist, a political theorist, a historian, a journalist, and a revolutionary. Indeed, it was his revolutionary politics—and the threat of arrest by the authorities—that led him to flee his native land in May 1849. Politically, Marx was involved in several organizations, such as the International Workingmen's Association (also known as the First International), and wrote political pamphlets about historical and contemporary events, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, in which workers established an independent government to oppose Emperor Napoleon III. Marx penned many works, but some of his most famous include Grundrisse (Outlines) on wage labor, the state, and the world market; Capital, a three-volume work examining the economic structure of capitalism; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a critique of the establishment of a dictatorship in France in 1851 by followers of President Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew (the Eighteenth Brumaire refers to November 9, 1799, in the French Revolutionary Calendar, the date on which Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in a coup d'êtat); Critique of the Gotha Program, an evaluation of the political manifesto of Germany's United Workers Party; and The German Ideology, an outline of his basic thesis concerning human nature, namely that the nature of individuals (their proclivities for cooperation or competition) are not inherent but rather depend on the material conditions determining their existence. With his friend and political associate Friedrich Engels, Marx also wrote The Communist Manifesto (published in 1848), which was designed to serve as the platform of the Communist League, a workers' organization.

Marx is perhaps best known for his theory of history and for his analysis of how capitalism operates as an economic system. During his student days, Marx had been a follower of German philosopher Georg Hegel, who had argued that what he called the “spirit of different ages” is embodied in various nation-states and that history is a record of the progression of human societies from less freedom to greater freedom and is shaped by the application of reason. Arguing that each society has its own personality that explains its level of development, Hegel believed that world events represent the necessary unfolding of the historical spirit through time. In this regard, he often has been accused of holding a teleological view of history, one in which history is thought to unfold according to its own internal logic. Hegel's model of history was based on a temporal progression in which concepts of reality unfold according to the outcome of dialectical reasoning. Such a system of dialectics argues that an existing element (or thesis) contains within itself inherent contradictions that unwittingly create its opposite (its antithesis). The result is a conflict between the two that ultimately results in the emergence of a new element (the synthesis), but this new element also contains its own internal contradictions, [Page 294]causing the process to begin anew. Hegel argued that each iteration of this dialectical conflict resulted in a level of development higher than the previous one and would continue until an end point where the highest possible state of freedom had been reached (a so-called end of history).

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