Politics & International Relations
Karl Marx
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary socialist whose ideas laid the foundation for modern communism. He is best known for his critical analysis of capitalism and his belief in the inevitable class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Marx's work has had a profound impact on political and economic thought, shaping the development of socialist and communist movements worldwide.
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8 Key excerpts on "Karl Marx"
eBook - PDFFrom Kant to Lévi-Strauss
The Background to Contemporary Critical Theory
- Jon Simons(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
‘Superstructural’ social, political and legal forms could be understood to be determined by the economic ‘base’, the mode of production. Western Marxism, in contrast, has tended to be more interested in Marx’s earlier, philosophical works and in concepts such as alienation or commodity fetishism, which offer a great deal of insight into the subjective conditions of life under capitalism. Western Marxists focus on the cultural and social forms of capitalism which characterise the experiences of social classes, specialising in analyses of the ideologies that sustain capitalism in its varying social forms. Introduction One of the most important thinkers of the modern world, Karl Marx was born in Trier in 1818 and studied at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin before establishing his reputation as the most original of the so-called Young Hegelians. Over the next fifty years Marx produced a stream of books, articles, pamphlets and letters which established him as the most significant figure of the nascent inter-national communist movement he had helped to create. During his own lifetime he established a reputation primarily as a vociferous critic of social democracy and utopian socialism, reflecting his active Karl Marx 51 engagement with the politics of his day. It was only after his death in 1883 that his significance as a theorist really emerged, in part due to the efforts of his long-time friend and co-author Friedrich Engels, but also due to the impact of his ideas on debates concerning the future of working-class struggle. Today Marx’s influence within critical theory is mainly felt through the work of Western Marxists, particularly Lukács, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, all of whom sought to develop Marx’s suggestive analysis of culture and literary form into an account of the ideological basis of capitalism.
eBook - PDF- Gerard Delanty, Engin F Isin, Gerard Delanty, Engin F Isin(Authors)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
The general consensus, at least among many contemporary liberals, seems to be that Marx was an astute analyst of capital-ism, but the political, social and historical theories associated with his writings can com-fortably be left behind (see, for example, Holmes, 1998). A better illustration of the interrelationship between theoretical argu-ment and contemporary political concerns surely could not be conceived, and the irony of his posthumous reputation – given his understanding of the relationship between ideas and interests – would doubtless not have been lost on Marx. Nevertheless, such critical assessments tend to offer only partial and one-sided readings of Marx. It is certainly true that one could not fully understand his life and work without exploring his own political radicalism, but such a full-blooded exploration is not under-taken here. In outlining his relationship to the theory and practice of historical sociology, such overt political preferences need not bear too heavily on the analysis in any case. Based on the understanding of historical sociology outlined previously, Marx’s thought clearly offers a powerful explanatory social theory based on an understanding of human progress; to that extent, it is worthwhile considering it in its own right. Moreover, very much like Max Weber, Karl Marx saw no clear distinc-tion between historical and sociological analy-sis. By teasing out elements of Marx’s intellectual formation – especially his histori-cal and theoretical interests outside of the 1 Karl Marx and Historical Sociology DUNCAN KELLY well-known critique of political economy – the range and depth of his contribution to the study of historical sociology can be more easily appreciated. In the discussion that follows, therefore, four principal arguments are put forward.
eBook - PDF- A. Hess(Author)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
2 Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy General presuppositions and/or theoretical affiliations and influ- ences: historical materialism; German philosophy (G.F.W. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach), political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, John Stuart Mill), Charles Darwin. Model/paradigm(s): capitalism (200 years). Concepts: labour power, exploitation, class struggle, classes, class as a social relationship, class consciousness, forces of production, relations of production. Empirical environment(s): Germany, England, France, Russia, USA. Karl Marx (1818–83) was not a sociologist. Yet modern contempo- rary sociology would not be the same and certainly at a loss if the contributions of Karl Marx were not to be taken into account. Marx himself did not call his approach ‘sociology’ but rather critique of political economy (Marx, 1983: 158–61). ‘Critique of Political Economy’ can have a double meaning. It could mean that one is critical of political economy; thus distancing oneself from the field of criticism, i.e. political economy. Critique of Political Economy could also mean the criticism of society from the standpoint of politi- cal economy. Traits of both perspectives can be found in Marx’s work. If one reads Marx, the first impression is that he writes pri- marily about the economic sphere; production, labour, and eco- nomic exploitation are the words that appear time and time again – and after all: is not Marx’s most famous work called Das Kapital? Yet despite the fact that Marx, for the most part, uses this ‘economic’ lan- guage, it does not automatically follow that Marx’s thought is purely 10 Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy 11 economic or economistic. In Marx’s work we can also find traces that clearly separate him from political economy.
eBook - PDF- Olaniyi, Olayiwola Olubodun(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Daya Publishing House(Publisher)
5: Marxian Political Economy 5.1. Marxian Political Economy The political and economic philosop- hy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in which the concept of class struggle plays a central role in understanding society’s allegedly inevitable development from bourgeois oppression under capitalism to a socialist and ultimately classless society is generally referred to as Marxian Political Economy model. Political economy was the original term used for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as withthe distribution of national income and wealth. Political economy originated in moral philosophy. It was developed in the 18th century as the study of the economies of states, or polities, hence the term political economy. In the late 19th century, the term economics came to replace political economy, coinciding with the publication of an infuential textbook by Alfred Marshall in 1890. Earlier, William Stanley Jevons, a proponent of mathematical methods applied to the subject, advocated economics for brevity and with the hope of the term becoming ‘the recognised name of a science.’ Today, political economy, where it is not used as a synonym for economics, may refer to very different things, including Marxian analysis, applied public-choice approaches emanating from the Chicago school and the Virginia school, or simply the advice given by economists to the government or public on general economic policy or on specific proposals. A rapidly growing mainstream literature from the 1970s has expanded beyond the model of economic policy in which planners maximize utility of a representative individual toward examining how political forces affect the choice of economic policies, especially as to distributional conficts and political institutions. It is now an area of study in universities. 5.1.1 Karl Marx This ebook is exclusively for this university only. Cannot be resold/distributed.
eBook - PDF- Melvin Richter(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
M A R X I S M Although this analysis was never taken quite literally, the followers of Marx and Engels severely restricted the scope of philosophy. Lenin, for example, wrote only on epistemologi- cal and methodological issues. His writings on the theory of party, of the state, of the revolution were never considered philosophical. With Plekhanov, who coined the term "dialec- tical materialism," a demarcation line quite alien to the spirit of Marx's original thought developed: on the one hand, phi- losophy, reduced to the explanation of the materialist point of view and basic features of the dialectical method; on the other hand, historical materialism, as a substitute for general sociol- ogy, dealing in a quasi-empirical way with social structure and basic laws of social development. The reduction of philosophy to the value-free study of knowledge went side by side with an essentially pragmatic treatment of politics. Marx rather underestimated politics by reducing it to a part of the social superstructure. Political power was hardly regarded by him as an independent objec- tive determinant; it was rather a derivative of the relations of production. On the other hand, Marx considered politics a mere "sphere of alienation," the activity of forces estranged from human beings who created them. That is why he held that social revolution had not to be identified with political revolution, that the latter had "a narrow horizon" and led to the rule of an elite. That is why he was convinced that the state must be transcended by the "association of immediate producers," which would no longer be a purely political institution. The subsequent history of Marxism in either its Social- Democratic or its Bolshevik form, is not compatible with all these basic assumptions. A "mere superstructure," politics became the most essential sphere of Marxist practical activity. Far from being a mere consequence of economic changes, politics sometimes became their cause.
eBook - PDF- Robert Bickel(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
Classical Social Theory in Use, pages 11–139 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 11 Karl Marx T hroughout his adult life, Marx was a relentless and insightful critic of prevailing academic and professional knowledge. This was abundantly evident as early as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx, 1844/ 2004), a collection of notebooks that give voice to Marx’s early think- ing on the nature of capitalism and its consequences for human beings. The Manuscripts were written while the 26-year-old Marx was in political exile in Paris, fleeing prosecution by the Prussian authorities for the radical character of his articles in Rheinische Zeitung, a weekly newspaper that he co- founded and edited. The following year, Marx was forced to leave France, and for a time, he lived in Brussels. He subsequently settled in London, where he lived and worked until his death in 1883. Marx never sought to publish the Manuscripts, which helps explain their sometimes sketchy, sometimes repetitious, and otherwise unfinished character. In fact, the Manuscripts were not discovered among Marx’s col- lected papers until the early 1930s. When they first appeared in print in the 1950s, they were judged to be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Marx and his scholarship (Bottomore, 1956). Here was the early Marx, introducing and explaining at length the seminal concept of alien- ation, an idea that is less conspicuous and less well developed in his later, better-known work. 12 Classical Social Theory in Use Classes and Class Struggle For readers with a casual, popularized knowledge of Marx, it will come as no surprise that he begins the first section of the first manuscript with a reference to a fierce struggle between capital and labor.
eBook - PDF- Anthony Parel(Author)
- 1983(Publication Date)
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press(Publisher)
A recent example of such an effort is Neal and Ellen Wood's book Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Social Context.3 Lynda Lange adds to the list by examining Rous-seau's political thought. What are the elements in Rousseau's criti-cism of society that are valuable from a Marxist perspective? Lange argues that in Rousseau there is an attempt at an individual solution to a collective problem—withdrawal from competition, pursuit of self knowledge, and the lessening of needs. She warns, however, that historical materialism would be subverted completely if the political question were resolved into individual moral questions. When one turns to the non-Marxist (mainly liberal) conceptions of the relationship between ideology and politics, what strikes one at first is the variety of opinions held on the subject. This may be due to the absence of a coherent non-Marxist epistemology common to all such opinions. There is no counterpart to dialectical materialism. The U Ideology, Philosophy and Politics closest one gets to such an epistemology is perhaps in the sociology of knowledge. Ideology is viewed in sociological terms, in terms of the functions it performs in politics, chiefly that of legitimating pol-itical proposals and political institutions. Epistemological issues are not given much attention, if any. Ideology is recognized as belong-ing to the category of beliefs and commitment and as constituting a belief closed moral system. Any belief held by a politically effec-tive group, regardless of the moral content of that, which purports to legitimate the political proposals of that group, is thought to quali-fy as ideology. Whereas in the Marxist conception class is the sole source of ideological thought, in the non-Marxist conception the source is not limited to class: it could be race, or nation, or sect, or culture, or way of life and the like.
eBook - PDF- Edward A. Purcell(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
Marx and Engels 125 Bernstein, Kautsky directly declares that the theory of historical materialism is even today still in the beginning stage of its development. The more difficult it is to identify an idea, the more difficult it is to critique it, of course. Evaluation of any theory must be preceded by its clarification, yet any critic who tries to express Marx's thought more clearly than Marx himself at once risks accusa-tions of deliberate distortion or of having misunderstood Marxism. To avoid these reproaches, it is necessary to expound the views of Marx and Engels as much as possible in their own words, noting everything that is unclear. For the question that interests us, Marx's celebrated preface to his A Contri-bution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) has exceptionally impor-tant significance. 5 What does this text offer toward characterizing the signifi-cance of ideas in history? Current criticism has rightly noted a number of ambiguities in it; I need only summarize what others have said before. From Marx's point of view, the role of the prime mover of history is played by material productive forces, under which mode of production is, appar-ently, to be understood. Marx directly says that, the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. Conditions in what sense, however? Is the mode of production the only primary cause of social development, or is it rather only one of the causes, acting together with other causes and conditions? At the beginning of the text under consideration Marx says that the sum total of productive relations, or, what is the same, the economic structure of society, corresponds to a definite stage in the development of material productive forces.
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