Marx and Engels

Karl Marx (1818 - 1883)

The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite!

The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified and his meanings adapted to a great variety of political circumstances. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that is been only recently that scholars had the opportunity to appreciate Marx's intellectual stature.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

Marx's contribution to our understanding of society has been enormous. His thought is not the comprehensive system evolved by some of his followers under the name of dialectical materialism. The very dialectical nature of his approach meant that it was usually tentative and open-ended. There was also the tension between Marx the political activist and Marx the student of political economy. Many of his expectations about the future course of the revolutionary movement have, so far, failed to materialize. However, his stress on the economic factor in society and his analysis of the class structure in class conflict have had an enormous influence on history, sociology, and study of human culture..

His work

"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand"

No thinker in the 19th-century has perhaps had so direct, deliberate and powerful influence upon mankind as Karl Marx. The strength of his influence was unique. He completed the bulk of his work between 1844 and 1883, a period of democratic nationalism, trade unionism and revolution.

Because men are conditioned by the material world into which they are born, their ideas assume objective proportions. Under this influence, men misinterpret the nature of the world in which they breathe, work, love, suffer and die. They misunderstand their position and the meaning of their position.

Marx held that values could not be contemplated in isolation from their historical context. True insight into the historical process, without the aid of moral standards, make clear to a rational being what steps it is proper for him to adopt. As a result, Marx had no new ethical or social ideal to press upon mankind. He made his appeal solely to reason, to the practical intelligence. So, Marx denounced the existing state of things by making his appeal to history and not to a set of ahistorical ideals as the Utopian Socialists and liberal bourgeois reformers had done before him. Bourgeois society was the result of those laws of social development which made it inevitable that at a certain stage of historical development one social class, pursuing its own interests, should dispossess and exploit another social class. The oppressors are threatened not with deliberate retribution on the part of their victims, but with the inevitable destruction which history has in store for them. As a class, the bourgeoisie are doomed to disappear and without knowing it, they have dug their own graves. Marx's language is always that of the herald or prophet. He speaks not in the name of human beings but of universal laws. He seeks not to rescue, nor to improve, but to warn and condemn, to reveal the truth and to refute falsehood.

Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means / forces 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 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. Conflict between social classes being something which is inherent in all human history

The works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Marx: 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 Poverty of Philosophy (1845), Wage-Labor and Capital (1847), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Grundrisse (1857), Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), 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 Program (1875), Notes on Wagner (1883)

Marx and Engels: The German Ideology (1845), The Holy Family (1845), Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Writings on the U.S. Civil War (1861), Capital, vol. 2 [posthumously, published by Engels] (1893), Capital, vol. 3 [posthumously, published by Engels] (1894)

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1844), The Peasant War in Germany (1850), Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1852), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Dialectics of Nature (1883), Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)

Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895)

German political activist and philosopher. Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (Communist Manifesto) (1848) and other political works. His own philosophical writing, including Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (The Condition of the Working Class in England) (1845) {at Amazon.com}, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (1880), and Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1888), provided an excellent exposition of dialectical materialism and significantly influenced the development of the ideology of modern communism. His analysis of bourgeois family life in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) offers an interesting anticipation of feminist concern with the place of women in society by noting the role of patriarchal oppression in preserving the capitalist order and by urging the elimination of private domestic labor for women.

"It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of being conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation. A cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes.

Fredrick Engels
Dialectics of Nature

"Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, or motion without matter, nor can there be."

"Change of form of motion is always a process that takes place between at least two bodies, of which one loses a definite quantity of motion of one quality (e.g. heat), while the other gains a corresponding quantity of motion of another quality (mechanical motion, electricity, chemical decomposition).

"Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics (dialectical thought), is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature."

Fredrick Engels
Dialectics of Nature

Recommended Reading:

Terrell Carver, Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought (St. Martins, 1993)
Introduction to Marx and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction, ed. by Richard Schmitt, Keith Lehrer, and Norman Daniels (Westview, 1997)
Engels After Marx, ed. by Manfred B. Steger and Terrell Carver (Penn. State, 1999)

Links

Marxists Internet Archive : http://www.marxists.org/

Works of Karl Marx: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/

Karl Marx (Library libcom.org): http://libcom.org/library/karl-marx

The Communist Manifesto, an incisive indictment and analysis of capitalism

Contemporary Marxist material

Other Marxist classics

Introduction to Marxist politics