Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx â€Å"If I had 26 letters of the alphabet I could rule the world.? †Those are the words of one of the greatest philosophers. Karl Heinrich Mark, â€Å"The Founder, or the Father of Modern communism and Marxism† was born May 1818-July 1883. Karl was born into a wealthy family. (1) He was one of the most infamous philosophers and tacticians in the socioeconomic structure of our times. He was however infamous to many people because of his political, economic and social views. Mr. Marx was also very influential to many significant people and countries worldwide. (2) Even today people use and elaborate on his quotes.His views continue to be debated and applied in today’s society. Karl Marx is dubbed the â€Å"father of Communism†, and wrote his Communist Manifesto in 1848, with Friedrich Engel's. (3) Economically, he opined that capitalism is very unfair and dehumanizing, in that the laborers or the masses were meant to work for a few rich pe ople who profit by paying very low wages. (2) He however noted the defining features of capitalism as alienation, exploitation and reoccurring, cyclical  depressions  leading to mass unemployment;(1) on the other hand capitalism is also characterized by â€Å"revolutionizing, industrializing urbanization. 3)  Marx considered the capitalist class to be one of the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly improved the means of production, more so than any other class in history, and was responsible for the overthrow of  feudalism  and its transition to capitalism. (4-5)   Capitalism can stimulate considerable growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to; reinvest profits in new technologies and  capital equipment. Karl Marx believed that throughout history, since the feudal ages, proletariats (working class) have been abused by higher classes, especially bourgeoisie (middle class).In Communism, proletariats are in power, and the sharing of the w ealth and business would be run by the worker’s themselves. . Today labor unions adopt the principle of deciding their own wages and seeking good working condition and can go on strike if their demands are not met. There is collective bargaining by workers Socially Karl Marx’  theories  on these changes happening around him are based around the idea of different stages that society goes through. He believes there are five stages in society and these are: tribal communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and finally ommunism. Most western societies have already gone through the first three stages and at the time of Marx were going through the fourth stages, as most still are. (2)Marx talks a lot about production, he theorizes that the part you play in the method of production affects the role you have in society as a whole. Each stage in society has a different production system in place. So in a capitalist society somebody who owns the means of production, the bourg eoisie, is the top of the social rank as they hold the power.The rest of society, the proletariats rely in the bourgeoisie to provide them with job so they have the  money  to survive. There will always be groups who have the power the oppressor, while the rest are the oppressed; those without any power who have to rely on others to provide them with money  so they are able to live. These two groups do not share the same interests. Marx saw this as class conflict, he believed that with time the conflict between the two would grow so great that the oppressed would rise up against the oppressor and society would move on to  the next  stage.In his opinion  the next  stage would be communism, his idea of the perfect society. The world is pretty much how Marx described it 150 years ago, which is quite impressive in itself,† Tormey said. â€Å"This is to say that we now have a more or less integrated world capitalist system, with a global rich and global poor — as Marx predicted. There is huge exploitation across all societies — the proliferation of sweatshops and export processing zones are all very much in keeping with Marx’s account. The peasantry is being systematically wiped out in a global process of dispossession, and of course social democracy, which started as a form of ultra moderate ‘Marxism,' Marxism-lite if you like, is in retreat in all areas where it once enjoyed hegemony,† he added. Politically The Soviets, Chinese, and other Communist states were at most based along. Marxist beliefs ch Communist leaders as Vladimir Ilyich  Lenin, Joseph  Stalin, and  Mao Zedong even Hitler  loyally claimed Marxist orthodoxy for their pronouncements which produced an egalitarian political society. 3) This led to evolution of varied forms of welfare capitalism, the improved condition of workers in industrial societies, and the recent demise of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have tende d to discredit Marx's dire and deterministic economic predictions. (4) In the Third World, a legacy of colonialism and anti-imperialist struggle has given Marxism popular support. In Africa, Marxism has had notable impact in such nations as Ethiopia, Benin, Angola, Kenya, and Senegal. In less stable societies Marxism's combination of materialist analysis with a militant sense of justice remains a powerful attraction. Karl Marx The first article speaking about it the power of the communist manifesto and the power it has in Europe. Usually all of the political parties in opposition of the current government go to the ideology of the communist manifesto adapting it in several languages in the Europe from English, French, German, Italian, and Danish languages. From the Karl Marx perspective it focuses on the struggles of the classes the rich and poor. The only way, how this level could ever be resolved is through a revolution or contending of the classes. In the days of history, we noticed that the arrangements of society in placed into various orders, and by social ranks. This was done in the Middle Ages with great empires. The modern bourgeois society has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, and new forms of struggle in place of old ones. In the views of Karl Marx it places two great classes; the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. The colonialization of the Americas and the controlling of the Chinese and Indian Markets allowed for the Bourgeoisie to continue to rise using the raw materials and resources of the new lands. In the area of industrialization is when the two classes became more apart than anything else when the bourgeoisie would do nothing while the proletariat did most of the work and were working in poor conditions including child labor. As it turns out to be the bourgeoisie became richer and had the advantages of political advances of that class. As the argument states that either republic or monarchy governance support the interest of the in the bourgeoisie. The current state is only a committee for the managing of the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. It has said that the bourgeoisie has destroyed the family relations because the individual is focused on self-interest only calling it a cash payment. It has destroyed the main purposes of society in which are religious activities, chivalrous enthusiasm, and sentimentalism and given the icy water of egotistical approach. It has given the meaning of anything personal as an exchange of value in the place of costless freedoms. An enable of this is the world Free Trade, in one word means exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it is substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. According to the view of Karl Marx, the bourgeoisie has basically stripped the occupations of the honored physician, lawyer, priest, or poet into paid wage laborers. It has turn away from the family it sentimental veil and reduce the family into a money relation. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without the changing the instruments of production and the relations of production and with them the relations of society. The need for the constant expanding of the markets and its products get the bourgeoisie to the surface of the world, not caring where to settle. The bourgeoisie though its exploitation of the world market given the character to production consumption in every country. The old fashion states controlled national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. The introduction of the new industries becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations; those do not work up indigenous raw material around in the globe. The bourgeoisie by the rapid movement of its instruments of production allowed for the expansion of communication creating the civilizations in these nations. The cheap prices of commodities are what allow other countries to adapt to the way of the bourgeoisie. This class has subjected the country to the rule of towns and small people. It created enormous cities that increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and only rescued a considerable part of the population from the rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, including the East and West. According to the view, this is a necessary consequence of this because of political centralization. Independent and loosely tied connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became into one nation with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, and on customs-tariff. The proportion the bourgeoisie provide including capital is developed to the same proportion of the proletariat, the modern working class, developed a class of labor who live only as they find work and do so by long as their labor increases capital. The labors, who sell themselves piecemeal are a commodity like other articles of commerce and are exposed the product into competition for the markets. Owing the extensive use of the machinery, division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and the charm of the workman. The cost of the production of a workman is restricted to the means of subsistence that he requires maintenance and for the propagation of his race. The price of a commodity and labor is equal to the cost of the production. In proportion, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases and the use of machinery and division of labor increases the burden of toil also increases and the prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery. The less the skill and exertion of strength by the manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer and distinctive social validity for the working class. The instruments of labor, less or more expensive to use, are according to their age and sex. Karl Marx Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818. Although his family was Jewish they converted to Christianity so that his father could pursue his career as a lawyer in the face of Prussia's anti-Jewish laws. A precocious schoolchild, Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, and then wrote a PhD thesis in Philosophy, comparing the views of Democritus and Epicurus.On completion of his doctorate in 1841 Marx hoped for an academic job, but he had already fallen in with too radical a group of thinkers and there was no real hope. Turning to journalism Marx rapidly became involved in political and social issues, and soon found himself having to consider communist theory. Of his many early writings, four, in particular stand out.‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction’, and ‘On The Jewish Question’, were both written in 1843 and published in the Deutsch-Franzà ¶sische Jahrbà ¼cher. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscri pts, written in Paris 1844, and the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ of 1845 remained unpublished in Marx's lifetime.Karl Marx (1818-1883) is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary communist, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics.However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx's theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, culminating in communism.Marx's economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx's prediction of the inevitable breakdown of capitalism for economic reasons, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal.In this text Marx begins to make clear the distance between him and that of his radical liberal colleagues among the Young Hegelians; in particular Bruno Bauer. Bauer had recently written against Jewish emancipation, from an atheist perspective, arguing that the religion of both Jews and Christians was a barrier to emancipation. In respon ding to Bauer Marx makes one of the most enduring arguments from his early writings, by means of introducing a distinction between political emancipation — essentially the grant of liberal rights and liberties — and human emancipation.Marx's reply to Bauer is that political emancipation is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of religion, as the example of the United States demonstrates then. However, pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings. Therefore liberal rights are designed to protect usfrom such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility — for Marx, the fact — that re al freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. So insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways which undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation.Now we should be clear that Marx does not oppose political emancipation, for he clearly sees that liberalism is a great improvement on the systems of prejudice and discrimination which existed in the Germany of his day. Nevertheless such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation. Unfortunately Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it is clear that it is closely related to the idea of non-alienated labour which we will explore belowThis work is home to the Marx's notorious remark that religion is the ‘opiate of the people’, and it is here that Marx sets out his account of religion in most detail. Just as importa ntly Marx here also considers the question of how revolution might be achieved in Germany, and sets out the role of the proletariat in bringing about the emancipation of society as a whole.With regard to religion, Marx fully accepted Feuerbach's claim in opposition to traditional theology that human beings had created God in their own image; indeed a view that long pre-dated Feuerbach. Feuerbach's distinctive contribution was to argue that worshipping God diverted human beings from enjoying their own human powers. While accepting much of Feuerbach's account Marx's criticizes Feuerbach on the grounds that he has failed to understand why people fall into religious alienation and so is unable to explain how it can be transcended. Marx's explanation, of course, is that religion is a response to alienation in material life, and cannot be removed until human material life is emancipated, at which point religion will wither away.Precisely what it is about material life that creates religio n is not set out with complete clarity. However it seems that at least two aspects of alienation are responsible. One is alienated labour, which will be explored shortly. A second is the need for human beings to assert their communal essence. Whether or not we explicitly recognize it, human beings exist as a community, and what makes human life possible is our mutual dependence on the vast network of social and economic relations which engulf us all, even though this is rarely acknowledged in our day-to-day life. Marx's view appears to be that we must, somehow or other, acknowledge our communal existence in our institutions.At first it is ‘deviously acknowledged’ by religion, which creates a false idea of a community in which we are all equal in the eyes of God. After the post-Reformation fragmentation of religion, where religion is no longer able to play the role even of a fake community of equals, the state fills this need by offering us the illusion of a community of citizens, all equal in the eyes of the law. But the state and religion will both be transcended when a genuine community of social and economic equals is created.Of course we are owed an answer to how such a society could be created. It is interesting to read Marx here in the light of his third Thesis on Feuerbach where he indicates how it will not happen. The crude materialism of Robert Owen and others assumes that you can change people by changing their circumstances. However, how are those circumstances to be changed?By an enlightened philanthropist like Owen who can miraculously break through the chain of determination which ties down everyone else? Marx's response, in both the Theses and the Critique, is that the proletariat can break free only by their own self-transforming action. Indeed if they do not create the revolution for themselves — guided, of course, by the philosopher — they will not be fit to receive it.The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts cove r a wide range of topics including much interesting material on private property and communism, and on money, as well as developing Marx's critique of Hegel. However, they are best known for their account of alienated labour. Here Marx famously depicts the worker under capitalism as suffering from four types of alienated labour. First, from the product, which as soon as it is created is taken away from its producer. Second, in productive activity (work) which is experienced as a torment. Third, from species-being, for humans produce blindly and not in accordance with their truly human powers.Finally from other human beings, where the relation of exchange replaces mutual need. That these categories overlap in some respects is not a surprise given Marx's remarkable methodological ambition in these writings. Essentially he attempts to apply a Hegelian deduction of categories to economics, trying to demonstrate that all the categories of bourgeois economics — wages, rent, exchang e, profit etc- are ultimately derived from an analysis of the concept of alienation. Consequently each category of alienated labour is supposed to be deducible from the previous one.However, Marx gets no further than deducing categories of alienated labour from each other. Quite possibly in the course of writing he came to understand that a different methodology is required for approaching economic issues. Nevertheless we are left with a very rich text on the nature of alienated labour. The idea of non-alienation has to be inferred from the negative, with the assistance of one short passage at the end of the text ‘On James Mill’ in which non-alienated labour is briefly described in terms which emphasise both the immediate producer's enjoyment of production as a confirmation of his or her powers, and also the idea that production is to meet the needs of others, thus confirming for both parties our human essence as mutual dependence. Both sides of our species essence are revealed here: our individual human powers and our membership in the human community.It is important to understand that for Marx alienation is not merely a matter of subjective feeling, or confusion. The bridge between Marx's early analysis of alienation and his later social theory is the idea that the alienated individual is ‘a plaything of alien forces’, albeit alien forces which are themselves a product of human action. In our daily lives we take decisions that have unintended consequences, which then combine to create large-scale social forces which may have an utterly unpredicted effect.In Marx's view the institutions of capitalism — themselves the consequences of human behaviour — come back to structure our future behaviour, determining the possibilities of our action. For example, for as long as a capitalist intends to stay in business he must exploit his workers to the legal limit. Whether wracked by guilt or not the capitalist must act as a ruthle ss exploiter. Similarly the worker must take the best job on offer; there is simply no other sane option. But by doing this we reinforce the very structures that oppress us. The urge to transcend this condition, and to take collective control of our destiny — whatever that would mean in practice — is one of the motivating and sustaining elements of Marx's attraction to communism.The Theses on Feuerbach contain one of Marx's most memorable remarks ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’ (thesis 11). However the eleven theses as a whole provide, in the compass of a couple of pages, a remarkable digest of Marx's reaction to the philosophy of his day. Several of these have been touched on already (for example the discussions of religion in theses 4, 6 and 7, and revolution in thesis 3) so here I will concentrate only on the first, most overtly philosophy, thesis.In the first thesis Marx states his objections to ‘all hitherto existing’ materialism and idealism. Materialism is complimented for understanding the physical reality of the world, but is criticised for ignoring the active role of the human subject in creating the world we perceive. Idealism, at least as developed by Hegel, understands the active nature of the human subject, but confines it to thought or contemplation: the world is created through the categories we impose upon it.Marx combines the insights of both traditions to propose a view in which human beings do indeed create — or at least transform — the world they find themselves in, but this transformation happens not in thought but through actual material activity; not through the imposition of sublime concepts but through the sweat of their brow, with picks and shovels. This historical version of materialism, which transcends and thus rejects all existing philosophical thought, is the foundation of Marx's later theory of history. As Marx puts it in the 184 4 Manuscripts, ‘Industry is the real historical relationship of nature †¦ to man’. This thought, derived from reflection on the history of philosophy, sets the agenda for all Marx's future workCapitalism is distinctive, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit. Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to explain how capitalism as a whole can make a profit. Marx's own solution relies on the idea of exploitation of the worker. In setting up conditions of production the capitalist purchases the worker's labour power — his ability to labour — for the day.The cost of this commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other; i.e. in terms of the amount of soci ally necessary labour power required to produce it. In this case the value of a day's labour power is the value of the commodities necessary to keep the worker alive for a day. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Thus the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist.Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. In Marx's analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.ReferenceKarl Marx, `On the Jewish Question`: alienated labor, private property, and communism