Marx, Karl

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is widely known as the founder of scientific socialism, a revolutionary critic, in his own words, “of all that exists.” Born in Trier, close to the home of the French Revolution, formally educated at Bonn and Berlin, he was initially one of the Young Left Hegelians. His early political journalism led to exile in Brussels, Paris, then finally in London. The circuit was fateful, from German philosophy to French socialism and British political economy. While Lenin later popularised the idea that Marx's work was a combination of German idealism, French utopian socialism, and British radical political economy, it may be more useful to view these as items on an itinerary. Certainly Marx's travel and life path was essential to the development of his thought, even if much of it was unplanned. The Paris Manuscripts of 1844 have the radical [Page 474]flavour of Paris as much as the ruminations of the Grundrisse (written between 1857 and 1858) ([1953]1973) are evocative of Marx's years spent working in the silence of the Reading Room of the British Museum. Marx was an outsider, whose life took him from the Rhineland to the homeland of the Industrial Revolution in league with his comrade, Friedrich Engels, who was a textiles manufacturer, a capitalist in Manchester. Engels's life experience of the factory production process, as well as his friendship and financial support, were crucial to the fulfillment of Marx's project. There would have been no Marxism without Engels.

Marx's work was much more than German philosophy, French socialism, and British political economy, and while his theory can be characterised as the critique of political economy, bourgeois society, and capital, there are various other aspects that elude Lenin's easy additive formula. Marx was as deeply influenced by the French Romantic Enlighteners such as Rousseau as by the German Romantics such as Schiller. He was as profoundly struck by the philosophical materialism of Feuerbach and even more influenced by the idealism of Hegel. His prose style is animated by Goethe and Shakespeare. His cultural universe, along with that of the German Enlightenment, was formed by the images of classical antiquity and especially by the work of Aristotle. Even as late as Capital (1867), Marx is still working in the wake of Aristotle's images of value and of the human as a political creature, or city dweller. Marx's social theory is a brilliant synthesis of Western and critical culture, though its focus is at once specific as it is general: capitalist production itself. Capital, and capitalist production, are at the centre of Marx's work.

If German philosophy opens the stage, and French politics brings Marx to socialism, then it is the critique of political economy that sustains his work from 1844 on. Marx's major works in the critique of political economy—the Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, the 1859 Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, and Capital (1867)—can be seen as ongoing instalments in the research program that dominated his life from 1844. Of course, for Marx, it was a political program too. For knowledge was revolutionary, and the purpose even of the heavy tomes of Capital was to bring on the revolution. The Paris Manuscripts saw Marx establish the basic ethical problem of capitalism as private property. The basic problem with capitalism was not that it exploited workers economically by extracting surplus value from them, though it did this too. The real problem was that alienation denied the possibility of human autonomy, whether in the act of labour, in the appropriation of its material result, in the alienation from other actors or from the species of humankind. The limit of Marx's argument is that it posits an anthropological holism for humans as the image of all things. The implication of the Paris Manuscripts is that socialism would involve some kind of return or recovery of an original state or condition, where the division of labour could be rolled back and specialization overcome. Marx's early work contains a kind of romantic antimodernism. The positive aspect of Marx's early humanism lies in its insistence that social institutions and the prospect of social change result from willed human activity. Humankind solves only such problems as it sets itself. The urgency of this sense is apparent in Marx's famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach—“the philosophers have interpreted the world, thus far, the point, however, is to change it.” This was the Marx who later most fully inspired the Western Marxists, such as Gramsci and Lukács, just as the image of alienation hit home on its first English translation into the 1960s to coincide with the radicalism of the social movements that also valued dreams of autonomy and freedom above all else.

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