Western ideologies have often been philosophical, combining critical reflection with systematic boldness. But few philosophies have been social or political ideologies. Marxism is almost unique in this regard. Arising out of the thinking of a German philosopher, it became first a comprehensive conception of human nature, history, society, and salvation, and then the mobilizing ideology of nations. Marxism warns us not to forget that our thinking about human beings and their lives arises out of history and is capable of being realized in history. Moreover, it was no accident that Marxism became the framework of commitments and of conduct for millions. For its turn away from abstract, theoretical thinking to practice and action is part of its very understanding of history, society, thought, and the ultimate goals of human life.
Marxism arises out of the life and work of Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–1883), who was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, in Prussia. Marx’s father, Heinrich, was a lawyer of Jewish descent who converted to Christianity in 1824. He expected his son to practice law also, and Karl Marx entered the University of Bonn in 1836 with this intention. But a year later, he transferred to Berlin, became associated with Bruno Bauer and the young left-wing Hegelians, and turned to philosophy. These disciples of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had traded in Hegel’s reverence for religion, morality, philosophy, and the spiritual character of history for a humanistic critique in which religion, morality, and traditional politics were viewed as distortions of what is genuinely human and ultimately as sources of alienation. According to Ludwig Feuerbach, a young theologian and a leader of the movement, Hegel had been wrong to see all things, including human culture, society, and morality, as expressions of Spirit or the divine; rather, all things, even God, are in truth expressions of human interests and human productivity.
After completing his doctoral dissertation, on the ancient atomists and critics of religion, Democritus and Epicurus, at the University of Jena in 1841, Marx turned to journalism. He edited the radical newspaper the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne until 1843, when government censorship led him to resign. During this period Marx completed his critique of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s central work on ethics and politics, and wrote his famous review-essay of Bauer’s The Jewish Question, with its important treatment of political alienation, the primacy of social existence, and the relation between money and labor.
In June of 1843 Marx married his childhood love, Jenny von Westphalen, and together they moved to Paris, as Marx joined Arnold Ruge, another young left-wing Hegelian, in editing the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Yearbooks). In France Marx became reacquainted with Friedrich Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator. By the end of 1844, the two had completed their first project, The Holy Family, a critique of young Hegelian philosophy on the basis of a new humanism, a critical analysis of the Hegelian treatment of property, and an attack on the hidden theology of the young radicals.
In 1845 Marx was banished from Paris and moved to Brussels. He and Engels joined the Communist League in 1847 and in February 1848, on the eve of the revolutions in France, published their famous Manifesto. Then, after moving back and forth across Western Europe, Marx was finally expelled from all Prussian territories; he set sail for London, where he settled in 1849 and lived for virtually all of his remaining years.
The 1850s and 1860s were extremely difficult decades for Marx and his family. Poverty and illness filled their lives with suffering and grief. By 1856 three of the six Marx children had died. Marx worked steadily, even fanatically, ten hours a day in the British Museum studying economics and the analysis of political economy, and then writing at home long into the night. The results were the Critique of Political Economy of 1859; the long unpublished draft on political economy called the Grundrisse (1857–58); and, most important, the critical analysis of capitalism, Capital, the first volume of which was published in 1867. The final two volumes were published by Engels in 1885 and 1894, after Marx’s death.
During the 1850s Marx wrote articles for the New York Daily Tribune, but the American Civil War put an end to even such modest employment. Fortunately, by the end of the decade, a small bequest to Jenny and Engels’s support from his company in Manchester bettered the Marx family’s situation. By this time, however, Marx’s health was very bad.
In 1864 Marx helped found the International Working Men’s Association in London and served on its General Council for seven years. But his health deteriorated steadily. Physically debilitated, Marx was increasingly less productive in what would be his last decade. In 1881 Jenny died of cancer; ill since 1878, she had been less and less able to help decipher his notorious handwriting. Then, on March 14, 1883, Marx too died, leaving to Engels the task of editing the remaining volumes of Capital. Less than forty years later, in the Russian Revolution of 1917, history would seek to confirm Marx’s understanding of it in a rare, if not unique, celebration of the efficacy of philosophical thought to change the world—and not merely to understand it.
Recommended Readings
Avineri, Shlomo. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
Ball, Terence, and James Farr (eds.). After Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Cohen, Gerald. Karl Marx’s Theory of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Elster, Jon. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Lukes, S. Marxism and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Tucker, Robert C. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Wood, Alan. Karl Marx. London: Routledge, 1981.