Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, England) was a philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmen's Association. Observing the miserable conditions of wage workers under early capitalist societies in Europe, Marx attempted to create a theory to emancipate humanity as well as those workers from economic domination through the changes of economic system. His theory contained: an element of Messianic idealism to liberate people form suffering; a perspective for social action based upon a theory of history; systematic expositions of fundamental issues of philosophy including ontology, epistemology, social ethics, social economic philosophy; a perspective which encompasses diverse areas of study including economics, history, and philosophy.
While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles between the ruled class (those who possess the means of production such as feudal lords, land owners, and capitalists) and the ruled class (those who do not possess the means of production such as slaves, peasants, wage workers), summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." Marx prophesized the end of class rule and envisioned to establish a utopian “classless society,” communism, where, according to Marx, “people work according to their ability and get according to their needs.”
His vision and ideals inspired Lenin and other revolutionaries who implemented Marxism in Russia, China, Cuba—not in Western Europe where Marx thought society was ready for a communist revolution. Contrary to Marx’s prophecy, communist countries became totalitarian, and culminated in Stalinist terror. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, the largest socialist empire, occurred in 1991, followed by the crumble of the socialist systems around the globe. The failure of Marxism led Marxists to adopt postmodernist skepticism about any universal emancipation theory like Marxism. The failure of Marxism was not only due to its practices, but also due to mistaken assumptions about human beings upon which radical atheistic materialist theories were built.
Despite the limitations of his theories, Marx was one of the most influential thinkers in the twentieth century because he discussed real problems of economic injustice that were of concern to most people, and still have not been fully resolved.
Biography
Parents
Karl Marx was born into a progressive and wealthy Jewish family in Trier, Prussia. His father Herschel, descending from a long line of rabbis, converted to Christianity in order to become a lawyer. The Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during Karl's early life.
Education
In 1835 Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn to study law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a result. The following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin.
In Berlin, Marx's interests turned to philosophy, and he joined the circle of students and young professors known as the "Young Hegelians." For many of them, the so-called left-Hegelians, Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, provided a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. Another Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, applied Hegelian criticism and argued that stopping anywhere short of nihilistic egoism was mysticism. His views were not accepted by most of his colleagues; nevertheless, Stirner's book was the main reason Marx abandoned the Feuerbachian view and developed the basic concept of historical materialism.
Career
When his mentor, Bruno Bauer, was dismissed from Friedrich-Wilhelms' philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne newspaper. After the newspaper was shut down in 1843, in part due to Marx's conflicts with government censors, Marx returned to philosophy, turned to political activism, and made his living as a freelance journalist. Marx was soon forced to move, something he would do often as a result of his views.
Marx first moved to France, where he re-evaluated his relationship with Bauer and the Young Hegelians, and wrote On the Jewish Question, which was mostly a critique of prevailing notions of civil rights and political emancipation. It also included several offensive references to Judaism and Jewish culture. It was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long close friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, a committed Communist, who kindled Marx's interest in the situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics. After he was forced to leave Paris because of his writings, Marx and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium.
There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a scathing criticism of the philosophy of Bruno Bauer, Hegel and the Young Hegelians. Marx next wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848. It had been commissioned by the Communist League (formerly, the League of the Just), an organization of German émigrés whom Marx had converted in London.
That year Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval; a working-class movement seized power from King Louis Philippe in France and invited Marx to return to Paris. When this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and restarted the Rheinische Zeitung, only to be swiftly expelled again.
In 1864 Marx organized the International Workingmen's Association, later called the First International, as a base for continued political activism. In his inaugural address, he purported to quote Gladstone's speech, to the effect that, "This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property." He repeated the citation in Volume 1 of Capital. The discrepancy between Marx's quote and the Hansard version of the speech (which was well-known) was soon employed in an attempt to discredit the International. Marx attempted to rebut the accusations of dishonesty, but the allegation continued to resurface. Marx later gave as his source the newspaper The Morning Star.
Engels devoted a good deal of attention to the affair in the preface to the fourth edition of Capital — which still did not put the matter to rest. Engels claimed that it was not The Morning Star but The Times that Marx was following. Indeed, modern critics of Marx continue to invoke Marx's supposed misquotation as evidence of general dishonesty.
Family life
Karl Marx's engagement to Jenny von Westphalen, an aristocrat, was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed by both the Marxes and Westphalens. Jenny and Karl had many children, several of whom died young. Their daughter Eleanor Marx (1855-1898), who was born in London, was a committed socialist who helped edit her father's works.
Later life
Marx was generally impoverished during the later period of his life, depending on financial contributions from close friend and fellow author, Friedrich Engels, to help with his family's living expenses and debts. Following the death of his wife Jenny in 1881, Marx died in London in 1883, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. The message carved on Marx's tombstone – a monument built in 1954 by the Communist Party of Great Britain – is: "Workers of the world, unite!" Marx's original tomb was humbly adorned.
Influences on Marx's thought
Marx's thought was strongly influenced by:
- The dialectical historicism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel;
- Materialism of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
- The classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo;
- French socialist and communist thought of Saint-Simon and Fourier.
Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded, therefore, that a communist revolution is inevitable. However, Marx famously asserted that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it," and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world. Consequently, most followers of Marx are not fatalists, but activists who believe that revolutionaries must organize social change.
Marx's view of history, which came to be called the materialist interpretation of history (and which was developed further as the philosophy of dialectical materialism) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically, through a clash of opposing forces. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed the ancient institution of legal slavery that was practiced in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet. (Hegel's philosophy remained and remains in direct opposition to Marxism on this key point.)
Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. For example, the Holy Trinity was a human projection of the family (man, woman and child) onto God. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.
The other important revision of Hegelianism was Engels' book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to reduce the historical dialectic to class conflict, and to see the modern working class as the most progressive force for revolution, the vanguard of history.
Marx's philosophy
See Marxism and socialism.Marx developed Marxism in collaboration with his colleague Friedrich Engels. His view of history and capitalism were important components of his philosophy.
Marx's View of History
According to Marx, the development of history is caused by the contradiction between the productive forces and the production relations of society.
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.(Marx, Karl, & Engels, Frederick Selected Works, p.182).
As the American scholar, Hal Draper remarked, there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike. Indeed, shortly before his death, Marx himself said, in response to so-called 'marxists' who supported reform instead of revolution, something to the effect of "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist." Subsequently, the merger of Marxist thought with Leninism, forming the official state ideology (Marxism-Leninism) of the former Soviet bloc, arguably departed further from Marx's own beliefs and analyses. However, following the 1989-1991 collapse of the Soviet bloc there has been a return by non-Marxists to Marx's own writing, in particular for insights in his analysis of capitalism that are still relevant today.
The notion of labor is fundamental in Marx's thought. Basically, Marx argued that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labor" and the capacity to transform nature labor power. For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the human mind and human imagination:
- A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1)
Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic and, with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting “nature” with “history.” Sometimes they use the phrase “existence precedes consciousness.” The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is—the social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability.
Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time.
Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means of production, literally those things, such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production. Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and social superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict.
Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or social classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict.
Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labor-power. Marx wrote extensively about this in his theory of alienation. Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labor—one's capacity to transform the world—is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market.
Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it reflects the fact (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labor-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the Philosophy of Right:
- Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.
Critique of capitalism
Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity—when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land or the tools necessary to produce a living. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power to live are "proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeoisie." (Marx considered this an objective description of capitalism, distinct from any one of a variety of ideological claims of or about capitalism). The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.
Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one place and sell them in another; more precisely, they buy things in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to Marx, industrial capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labor.
The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx believed that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy.
Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He argued that if the proletariat would seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would in general be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat—a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor—must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program," "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." [1]
Marx was an idealist in that he saw evil centered in social relations, or social structure, rather than in human beings. As such, he naively ignored the selfishness of those in the working class, who after seizing "the means of production" would develop a totalitarian system.
Critique of bourgeois democracy and of anti-Semitism
Some scholars have presented an alternative reading of Marx, primarily based on his essay On the Jewish Question. Economist Tyler Cowen, historian Marvin Perry, and political scientist Joshua Muravchik have suggested that what they see as an intense hatred for the "Jewish Class" was part of Marx's belief that if he could convince his contemporaries and the public to hate Jewish capitalists, the public would eventually come to hate non-Jewish capitalists as well.
Most scholars reject this claim for two reasons: first, it is based on two short essays written in the 1840s, and ignores the bulk of Marx's analysis of capitalism written in the following years. Second, it distorts the argument of On the Jewish Question, in which Marx deconstructs liberal notions of emancipation. During the Enlightenment, philosophers and political theorists argued that religious authority had been oppressing human beings, and that religion must be separated from the functions of the state for people to be truly free. Following the French Revolution, many people were thus calling for the emancipation of the Jews.
At the same time, many argued that Christianity is a more enlightened and advanced religion than Judaism. For example, Marx's former mentor, Bruno Bauer, allegedly argued that Christians need to be emancipated only once (from Christianity), and Jews need to be emancipated twice — first from Judaism (presumably, by converting to Christianity), then from religion altogether.
Marx rejects Bauer's argument as a form of Christian ethnocentrism, if not anti-Semitic. Marx proceeds to turn Bauer's language, and the rhetoric of anti-Semites, upside down to make a more progressive argument. First, he points out that Bruno Bauer's argument is too parochial because it considers Christianity to be more evolved than Judaism, and because it narrowly defines the problem that requires emancipation to be religion. Marx instead argues that the issue is not religion, but capitalism. Pointing out that anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews are fundamentally anti-capitalist, Marx provides a theory of anti-Semitism by suggesting that anti-Semites scapegoat Jews for capitalism because too many non-Jews benefit from, or are invested in capitalism, to attack capitalism directly.
Marx also uses this rhetoric ironically to develop his critique of bourgeois notions of emancipation. Marx points out that the bourgeois notion of freedom is predicated on choice (in politics, through elections; in the economy, through the market), but that this form of freedom is anti-social and alienating. Although Bauer and other liberals believe that emancipation means freedom to choose, Marx argues that this is at best a very narrow notion of freedom. Thus, what Bauer believes would be the emancipation of the Jews is for Marx actually alienation, not emancipation. After explaining that he is not referring to real Jews or to the Jewish religion, Marx appropriates this anti-Semitic rhetoric against itself (in a way that parallels his Hegelian argument that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction) by using "Judaism" ironically as a metaphor for capitalism. In this sense, Marx states, all Europeans are "Jewish." This is a pun on two levels. First, if the Jews must be emancipated, Marx is saying that all Europeans must be emancipated. Second, if by "Judaism" one really means "capitalism," then far from Jews needing to be emancipated from Christianity (as Bauer called for), Christians need to be emancipated from Judaism (meaning, bourgeois society). (See works by historian Hal Draper and David McLellan).
Marx's influence
Marx and Engels' work covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a political and economic philosophy dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions (and it is important to distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx believed." Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. mode of production, class, commodity) to understand capitalist and other societies, or to describe those who believe that a workers' revolution is the only means to a communist society. The clash between Marx's personal philosophical systems and the umbrella term Marxist is often misconstrued, a prime example being the bias placed against studying Marx’s writings during the Cold War period in American academic institutions. Marxism has influenced Christian thought, too, especially Liberation Theology that argues in favor of God's especial concern for, or bias towards, the poor and advocates that when the poor become conscious of their exploitation, they will then be empowered to demand and achieve their rights. Liberation theologians do not necessarily support violence as part of this process, although some have.
Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization collapsed in 1914, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary" socialism, and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I.
World War I also led to the Russian Revolution and the consequent ascendance of Vladimir Lenin's leadership of the communist movement, embodied in the "Comintern" or "Third International." Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called Leninism or Bolshevism, which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized Communist Party.
After Lenin's death, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, seized control of the Party and state apparatus. He argued that before a world-wide communist revolution would be possible, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to dedicate itself to building communism in its own country. It was Stalin's Soviet Union and its policies that undermined the concept of Marxism in the Western world. For many years, especially after the Second World War during the Cold War period, Marxism was popularly equated with Stalin's communism, which was a totalitarianism that desregarded civil rights.
In 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union and in 1938 founded the competing "Fourth International." Some followers of Trotsky argued that Stalin had created a bureaucratic state rather than a socialist state.
In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could play a leading role in a Communist revolution. This was a profound departure from Marx's own view of revolution, which focused exclusively on the urban proletariat. He believed would take place in advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany and England. The version of Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School. Their work is known as critical theory, indebted to Marxist philosophy and the cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.
The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First, because of Stalinism and Fascism, they had grave doubts about the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by Marxists for divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise.
Other influential non-Bolshevik Marxists at that time include Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism. Henryk Grossman, who elaborated the mathematical basis of Marx's "law of capitalist breakdown," was another affiliate of the Frankfurt School. Also prominent during this period was the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.
In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by reconstructing it through the lens of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to "Analytical Marxism," an academic movement which included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer.
Marx was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history. In July 2005, Marx was the surprise winner of the "Greatest Philosopher of All Time" poll by listeners of BBC BBC Radio 4 (UK).[2]
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Gould, Stephen JayA Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral - E. Ray Lankester, Page 1, Find Articles.com (1999). (Marx's tomb)
- Little, Daniel The Scientific Marx, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, ISBN 0816615055 (Marx's work considered as science)
- McLellen, David Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, NY: Harpercollins, 1978 ISBN 0060905859
- Draper, HalKarl Marx's Theory of Revolution (4 volumes). NY: Monthly Review Press, 1981 ISBN 085345566X
- Nicolaevski, Boris & Maenchen-Helfen, OttoKarl Marx: Man and Fighter, NY: Penguin books, 1973 ASIN:\ B0007AEO6Y
- Wheen, Francis Karl Marx: A Life, NY: W. W Norton & Co, 2001, ISBN 0393321576(biography of Marx)
- Berlin, Isaiah and Ryan, Alan Karl Marx: His Life and Environment NY: Oxford University Press, 1996 ISBN 0195103262
See also
- Friedrich Engels
- Marxism
- Class struggle
- historical materialism
- Das Kapital
- The Frankfurt School
- History of socialism
- Unification Thought
External links
Bibliography and online texts
- Marx and Engels Internet Archive [3]
- Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)
- On the Jewish Question (1843)
- Notes on James Mill (1844)
- Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1844)
- Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
- The German Ideology [with Engels] (1845-46)
- The Poverty of Philosophy (1846-47)
- Wage-Labour and Capital (1847)
- Manifesto of the Communist Party [with Engels] (1847-48)
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
- Grundrisse (1857-58)
- A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
- Writings on the U.S. Civil War [with Engels; compiled] (1861)
- Theories of Surplus Value, 3 volumes (1862)
- Value, Price and Profit (1865)
- Capital vol. 1 (1867)
- The Civil War in France (1871)
- Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
- Notes on Wagner (1883)
- Capital, vol. 2 [posthumously, by Engels] (1893)
- Capital, vol. 3 [posthumously, by Engels] (1894)
- Letters [with Engels; compiled] (1833-95)
- Ethnological Notebooks — ISBN 9023209249 (1879-80)
- Works by Karl Marx. Project Gutenberg
- "The Reality Behind Commodity Fetishism" (in English) at Sic et Non (in German)
Biographies
- Vladimir Lenin's Karl Marx Biography
- Franz Mehring's Karl Marx: The Story of His Life
- Francis Wheen's The Man Behind the Mask
Portraits
Encyclopedia entries
Credits
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