1818 - 1883)
Marx was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He developed the theory of historical materialism, analyzing class struggle under capitalism and predicting the system's overthrow by the proletariat in favor of communism. Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto (1848) with his lifelong friend Friedrich Engels, and undertook a critique of classical political economy in his magnum opus, Das Kapital (1867–1894). Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence and have influenced revolutions and uprisings in many countries.
Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx earned a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as The German Ideology (written 1846) and the Grundrisse (written 1857–1858). While in Paris, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and met Engels, who became a close collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx's ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital. From 1864, Marx was involved in the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he fought the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote on revolution, the state and the transition to communism. He died stateless in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.
Marx's critiques of history, society and political economy hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power for wages. Employing his historical materialist approach, Marx predicted that capitalism produced internal contradictions like previous socioeconomic systems, and that these tensions would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as the socialist mode of production. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers.[5] Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.
Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures of the modern era, and his work has been both lauded and criticised. Marxism has exerted major influence on socialist thought and political movements, with Marxist schools of thought such as Marxism–Leninism and its offshoots becoming the guiding ideologies of revolutions that took power in many countries during the 20th century, forming communist states. Marx's work in economics has had a strong influence on modern heterodox theories of labour and capital, and he is often cited as one of the principal architects of modern sociology.
Das Kapital remains one of the most influential and controversial works in the history of social science and philosophy. Published in 1867, Karl Marx intended this work to be a scientific analysis of the inner workings of the capitalist system, moving beyond the moral critiques of his predecessors to uncover what he called the laws of motion of modern society. At its core, the book is an exhaustive study of how wealth is produced, how value is determined, and how the relationship between capital and labor inevitably leads to internal contradictions.
The review must begin where Marx begins: with the commodity. Marx argues that a commodity has two types of value. First is the use-value, which is the physical utility of an object. Second is the exchange-value, which is the proportion in which one commodity can be traded for another. Marx asks what all commodities have in common that allows them to be compared and exchanged. His answer is human labor. Specifically, he develops the Labor Theory of Value, suggesting that the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time required for its production.
From this foundation, Marx introduces his most significant contribution to economic thought: the theory of surplus value. He distinguishes between labor and labor power. In a capitalist system, the worker sells their labor power—the ability to work—to the capitalist for a wage. The capitalist then uses this labor power to produce commodities. Marx argues that the worker produces more value in a day than the value of the wage they receive. The difference between the value the worker creates and the wage paid to them is surplus value, which the capitalist keeps as profit. This, according to Marx, is the fundamental source of exploitation in a market economy.
The drive to increase this surplus value leads to two different strategies. The first is the creation of absolute surplus value, which involves lengthening the working day. The second is relative surplus value, which involves increasing the productivity of labor through technology and the division of labor, thereby reducing the time the worker needs to produce the value of their own subsistence. Marx provides a harrowing historical account of the "Working Day" in 19th-century England, documenting the physical and mental toll that the pursuit of absolute surplus value took on the proletariat, including child labor and dangerous working conditions.
Another central theme of Das Kapital is the concept of commodity fetishism. Marx explains how, in a capitalist society, the social relationships between people are masked as relationships between things. Instead of seeing a coat as the product of a tailor's labor, we see it as an object with a price tag that relates to other objects with price tags. This process alienates individuals from their work and from each other, as the market becomes an autonomous force that dictates the conditions of human life rather than being a tool for human needs.
Marx also explores the inevitable tendency toward the concentration and centralization of capital. He argues that competition forces capitalists to constantly reinvest their profits into new machinery and technology to remain competitive. This results in larger firms swallowing smaller ones, leading to monopolies. Furthermore, the increasing reliance on machinery—what Marx calls constant capital—over human labor—variable capital—leads to a falling rate of profit over the long term. This creates a cycle of economic crises, as the system overproduces goods that an increasingly impoverished working class cannot afford to buy. The final sections of Volume One deal with what Marx calls "primitive accumulation." He challenges the notion that capital was originally built up through the frugality and hard work of a few individuals. Instead, he points to a violent history of land enclosures, colonialism, and slavery as the true origins of the capital required to jumpstart the industrial system. By stripping peasants of their land, the state created a class of "free" laborers who had no choice but to sell their labor power to survive.