Synopsis

Karl Marx Born in Prussia on May 5, 1818, he began exploring sociopolitical theories at
university among the Young Hegelians. He became a journalist, and his socialist writings would
get him expelled from Germany and France. In 1848, he published The Communist Manifesto
with Friedrich Engels and was exiled to London, where he wrote the first volume of Das Kapital
and lived the remainder of his life.
Early Life
Karl Heinrich Marx was one of nine children born to Heinrich and Henrietta Marx in Trier,
Prussia. His father was a successful lawyer who revered Kant and Voltaire, and was a passionate
activist for Prussian reform. Although both parents were Jewish with rabbinical ancestry, Karls
father converted to Christianity in 1816 at the age of 35.
This was likely a professional concession in response to an 1815 law banning Jews from high
society. He was baptized a Lutheran, rather than a Catholic, which was the predominant faith in
Trier, because he equated Protestantism with intellectual freedom. When he was 6, Karl was
baptized along with the other children, but his mother waited until 1825, after her father died.
Marx was an average student. He was educated at home until he was 12 and spent five years,
from 1830 to 1835, at the Jesuit high school in Trier, at that time known as the Friedrich-
Wilhelm Gymnasium. The schools principal, a friend of Marxs father, was a liberal and a
Kantian and was respected by the people of Rhineland but suspect to authorities. The school was
under surveillance and was raided in 1832.
Education
In October of 1835, Marx began studying at the University of Bonn. It had a lively and rebellious
culture, and Marx enthusiastically took part in student life. In his two semesters there, he was
imprisoned for drunkenness and disturbing the peace, incurred debts and participated in a duel.
At the end of the year, Marxs father insisted he enroll in the more serious University of Berlin.
In Berlin, he studied law and philosophy and was introduced to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel,
who had been a professor at Berlin until his death in 1831. Marx was not initially enamored with
Hegel, but he soon became involved with the Young Hegelians, a radical group of students
including Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, who criticized the political and religious
establishments of the day.
In 1836, as he was becoming more politically zealous, Marx was secretly engaged to Jenny von
Westphalen, a sought-after woman from a respected family in Trier who was four years his
senior. This, along with his increasing radicalism, caused his father angst. In a series of letters,
Marxs father expressed concerns about what he saw as his sons demons, and admonished
him for not taking the responsibilities of marriage seriously enough, particularly when his wife-
to-be came from a higher class.
Marx did not settle down. He received his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841, but his
radical politics prevented him from procuring a teaching position. He began to work as a
journalist, and in 1842, he became the editor of Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper in
Cologne. Just one year later, the government ordered the newspapers suppression, effective
April 1, 1843. Marx resigned on March 18th. Three months later, in June, he finally married
Jenny von Westphalen, and in October, they moved to Paris.
Paris
Paris was the political heart of Europe in 1843. There, along with Arnold Ruge, Marx founded a
political journal titled Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher (German-French Annals). Only a single
issue was published before philosophical differences between Marx and Ruge resulted in its
demise, but in August of 1844, the journal brought Marx together with a contributor, Friedrich
Engels, who would become his collaborator and lifelong friend. Together, the two began writing
a criticism of the philosophy of Bruno Bauer, a Young Hegelian and former friend of Marxs.
The result of Marx and Engelss first collaboration was published in 1845 as The Holy Family.
Later that year, Marx moved to Belgium after being expelled from France while writing for
another radical newspaper, Vorwrts!, which had strong ties to an organization that would later
become the Communist League.
Brussels
In Brussels, Marx was introduced to socialism by Moses Hess, and finally broke off from the
philosophy of the Young Hegelians completely. While there, he wrote The German Ideology, in
which he first developed his theory on historical materialism. Marx couldnt find a willing
publisher, however, and The German Ideology -- along with Theses on Feuerbach, which was
also written during this time -- were not published until after his death.
At the beginning of 1846, Marx founded a Communist Correspondence Committee in an attempt
to link socialists from around Europe. Inspired by his ideas, socialists in England held a
conference and formed the Communist League, and in 1847 at a Central Committee meeting in
London, the organization asked Marx and Engels to write Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei
(Manifesto of the Communist Party).
The Communist Manifesto, as this work is commonly known, was published in 1848, and shortly
after, in 1849, Marx was expelled from Belgium. He went to France, anticipating a socialist
revolution, but was deported from there as well. Prussia refused to renaturalize him, so Marx
moved to London. Although Britain denied him citizenship, he remained in London until his
death.
London
In London, Marx helped found the German Workers Educational Society, as well as a new
headquarters for the Communist League. He continued to work as a journalist, including a 10-
year stint as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune from 1852 to 1862, but he never
earned a living wage and was largely supported by Engels.
Marx became increasingly focused on capitalism and economic theory, and in 1867, he
published the first volume of Das Kapital. The rest of his life was spent writing and revising
manuscripts for additional volumes, which he did not complete. The remaining two volumes
were assembled and published posthumously by Engels.
Death
Marx died of pleurisy in London on March 14, 1883. While his original grave had only a
nondescript stone, the Communist Party of Great Britain erected a large tombstone, including a
bust of Marx, in 1954. The stone is etched with the last line of The Communist Manifesto
(Workers of all lands unite), as well as a quote from the Theses on Feuerbach.


2


Scarcely 15 months ago most of us assembled round this grave, then about to become the last
resting place of a grand and noble-hearted woman. Today we have it reopened, to receive what
remains of her husband.
Karl Marx was one of those pre-eminent men of whom a century produces not many. Charles
Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature upon our planet. Marx is the
discoverer of the fundamental law according to which human history moves and develops itself,
a law so simple and self-evident that its simple enunciation is almost sufficient to secure assent.
Not enough with that, Marx had also discovered the law [which] has created our actual state of
society with its great class-division of capitalists and wages-labourers; the law according to
which that society has become organised, has grown until it [has] almost outgrown itself, and
according to which it must ultimately perish like all previous historical phases of society. Such
results render it all the more painful that he should have been taken from us in the midst of his
work, and that, much as he did, still more he left uncompleted.
But science, though dear to him, was far from absorbing him entirely. No man could feel a purer
joy than he when a new scientific progress was secured anywhere, no matter whether practically
applicable or not. But he looked upon science above all things as a grand historical lever, as a
revolutionary power in the most eminent sense of the word. And as such he used, to such
purpose he wielded that immense knowledge, especially of history in all its branches of which he
disposed.
For he was indeed, what he called himself, a Revolutionist. The struggle for the emancipation of
the class of wages-labourers from the fetters of the present capitalistic system of economic
production, was his real element. And no more active combatant than he ever existed. The
crowning effort of this part of his work was the creation of the International Working Men's
Association of which he was the acknowledged leader from 1864-72. The Association has
disappeared, as far as outward show goes; but the fraternal bond of union of the working men of
all civilised countries of Europe and America is established once for ever, and continues to live
even without any outward, formal bond of union.
No man can fight for any cause without creating enemies. And he has had plenty of them. For the
greater part of his political life he was the best hated and best slandered man in Europe. But he
scarcely ever noticed calumny. If ever man lived calumny down, he did, and at the time of his
death he could look with pride upon the millions of his followers, in the mines of Siberia as well
as in the workshops of Europe and America; he saw his economical theories adopted as the
undisputed creed of universal socialism, and if he still had many opponents, there was scarcely
one personal enemy left.







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Contributors
Table of Contents
Introduction
Origins
Utopian socialism
Other early socialists
Marxian socialism
Socialism after Marx
Revisionism and revolution
Socialism in the era of world war
Postwar socialism
Socialism after communism
Marxian socialism
Despite their imagination and dedication to the cause of the workers, none of the early socialists
met with the full approval of Karl Marx, who is unquestionably the most important theorist of
socialism. In fact, Marx and his longtime friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels were largely
responsible for attaching the label utopian, which they intended to be derogatory, to Saint-
Simon, Fourier, and Owen, whose fantastic pictures of future society they contrasted to their
own scientific approach to socialism. The path to socialism proceeds not through the
establishment of model communities that set examples of harmonious cooperation to the world,
according to Marx and Engels, but through the clash of social classes. The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles, they proclaimed in the Manifesto of the
Communist Party. A scientific understanding of history shows that these struggles will culminate
in the triumph of the working class and the establishment of socialism.
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According to Engels, the basic elements of Marxs theory are to be found in German philosophy,
French socialism, and British economics. Of these, German philosophy was surely the formative
influence on Marxs thinking. Born in Trier in the German Rhineland, Marx was a philosophy
student at the University of Berlin when the idealism of G.W.F. Hegel dominated German
philosophy. Hegel maintained that history is the story of the unfolding or realization of spirit
a process that requires struggle, agony, and the overcoming of obstacles to the attainment of self-
knowledge. Just as individual persons cannot realize their potentialespecially the potential for
freedomif they remain forever in a childish or adolescent condition, so spirit must develop
throughout history in a dialectical fashion. That is, individuals and even nations are characters in
a drama that proceeds through the clash of opposing ideas and interests to a greater self-
awareness and appreciation of freedom. Slavery, for example, was long taken for granted as a
natural and acceptable practice, but the slaves struggle to be recognized as a person was
bringing an end to slavery as master and slave came to recognize their common humanityand
thus to liberate themselves, and spirit, from a false sense of the masters superiority.
Like Hegel, Marx understood history as the story of human labour and struggle. However,
whereas for Hegel history was the story of spirits self-realization through human conflict, for
Marx it was the story of struggles between classes over material or economic interests and
resources. In place of Hegels philosophical idealism, in other words, Marx developed a
materialist or economic theory of history. Before people can do anything else, he held, they must
first produce what they need to survive, which is to say that they are subject to necessity.
Freedom for Marx is largely a matter of overcoming necessity. Necessity compels people to
labour so that they may survive, and only those who are free from this compulsion will be free to
develop their talents and potential. This is why, throughout history, freedom has usually been
restricted to members of the ruling class, who use their control of the land and other means of
production to exploit the labour of the poor and subservient. The masters in slaveholding
societies, the landowning aristocracy in feudal times, and the bourgeoisie who control the wealth
in capitalist societies have all enjoyed various degrees of freedom, but they have done so at the
expense of the slaves, serfs, and industrial workers, or proletarians, who have provided the
necessary labour.
For Marx, capitalism is both a progressive force in history and an exploitative system that
alienates capitalists and workers alike from their true humanity. It is progressive because it has
made possible the industrial transformation of the world, thereby unleashing the productive
power to free everyone from necessity. Yet it is exploitative in that capitalism condemns the
proletarians, who own nothing but their labour power, to lives of grinding labour while enabling
the capitalists to reap the profits. This is a volatile situation, according to Marx, and its inevitable
result will be a war that will end all class divisions. Under the pressure of depressions,
recessions, and competition for jobs, the workers will become conscious that they form a class,
the proletariat, that is oppressed and exploited by their class enemy, the bourgeoisie. Armed with
this awareness, they will overthrow the bourgeoisie in a series of spontaneous uprisings, seizing
control of factories, mines, railroads, and other means of production, until they have gained
control of the government and converted it into a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Under socialism or communismMarx and Engels drew no clear or consistent distinction
between the twogovernment itself will eventually wither away as people gradually lose the
selfish attitudes inculcated by private ownership of the means of production. Freed from
necessity and exploitation, people will finally live in a true community that gives each
individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions.
Marx maintained that the revolution by which socialism would be achieved was ordained by the
logic of capitalism itself, as the capitalists competition for profits led them to create their own
grave diggers in the proletariat. Even the role of the revolutionary, such as Marx, was confined
to that of midwife, for revolutionaries could do no more than speed along the inevitable
revolution and ease its birth pangs.
This, at least, was Marxs more or less official doctrine. In his writings and political activities,
however, he added several qualifications. He acknowledged, for example, that socialism might
supplant capitalism peacefully in England, the United States, and other countries where the
proletariat was gaining the franchise; he also said that it might be possible for a semifeudal
country such as Russia to become socialist without first passing through capitalist industrialism.
Moreover, Marx played an important part in the International Working Mens Association, or
First International, formed in 1864 by a group of labour leaders who were neither exclusively
revolutionary nor even entirely committed to socialism. In short, Marx was not the inflexible
economic determinist he is sometimes taken to be. But he was convinced that history was on the
side of socialism and that the equal development of all people to be achieved under socialism
would be the fulfillment of history





What is Karl Marx's 'scientific socialism'?
a method of understanding and predicting social, material and economical phenomena by examining
historical trends using the scientific method in order to derive probable outcomes and future
developments.





Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern tendencies of
history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded,
therefore, that a communist revolution is inevitable. However, Marx famously asserted in the
eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point however is to change it", and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to
alter the world. Consequently, most followers of Marx are not fatalists, but activists who believe
that revolutionaries must organize social change.
Marx's view of history, which came to be called the materialist conception of history (and
which was developed further as the philosophy of dialectical materialism) is certainly
influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel
believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the movement from the
fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and
greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute
involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary
leaps - episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed
the ancient institution of legal slavery that was practiced in the United States during his lifetime,
and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their
civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and
Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the
movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet. (Hegel's
philosophy remained and remains in direct opposition to Marxism on this key point.)
Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was
greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that
God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities
of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas
of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx
distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world
hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and
socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives
clearly.
The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was Engels' book, The
Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to conceive of the
historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern working class as the most
progressive force for revolution.The notion of labour is fundamental in Marx's thought.
Basically, Marx argued that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of
transformation "labour" and the capacity to transform nature labour power. For Marx, this is a
natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the human mind and human
imagination:A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to
shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst
architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before
he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1) Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic
and, with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes
Marxists express their views by contrasting "nature" with "history". Sometimes they use the
phrase "existence precedes consciousness". The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is
determined by where and when he is - social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or,
in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability. Marx did not believe
that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual.
Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and
through which people work are socially determined and change over time.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 history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (The Communist Manifesto, Chap. 1)
Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all,
their own labour-power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation.
As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more
materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own
labour - one's capacity to transform the world - is tantamount to being alienated from one's own
nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which
the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to
which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and
circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among
people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between
workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and
sold on the market.
Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely
related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests
of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and
eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve
an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the
means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes
the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a
subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be
false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although
the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who
produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to Marx and Engels) that
people under capitalism are alienated from their own labour-power. Another example of this sort
of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface to his
1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Religious suffering is, at one
and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion
is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people. Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the
primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function
as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.
Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely
the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers
and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production
developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity - when peasants became free to sell
their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land or
tools necessary to produce. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in
return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling
the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they
receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power to live are
"proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land
and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois." (Marx considered this an objective
description of capitalism, distinct from any one of a variety of ideological claims of or about
capitalism). The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.
Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one
place and sell them in another; more precisely, they buy things in one market and sell them in
another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a
difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then,
practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to
Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market
and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in
practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx
called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus
labour.
The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can,
and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class
to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of
production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over
time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor.
Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he
concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit
falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors
of the economy would collapse. Marx understood that during such a crisis the price of labor
would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth
of new sectors of the economy.
Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by
increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process
was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment
of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they
would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of
production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation
of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution
would in general be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without violence.
He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period
where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor - must
be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between
capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the
one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can
be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."
In the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in
Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert
Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School. Their work is known
as Critical Theory, a type of Marxist philosophy and cultural criticism heavily influenced by
Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists,
including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendance
of Stalinism and Fascism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of
proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected
economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by both orthodox
Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice for divorcing Marxist theory from
practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise.Other influential non-
Bolshevik Marxists at that time include Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci,
who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism. Henryk
Grossman, who elaborated the mathematical basis of Marx's 'law of capitalist breakdown', was
another affiliate of the Frankfurt School. Also prominent during this period was the Polish
revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly
Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States
independent of the Communist Party.In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought
as a coherent and scientific theory of history by reconstructing it through the lens of analytic
philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic movement which also included
Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another Anglophone champion
of Marx within the academy.






















Karl Marx -
The Sociology of
Knowledge


The Person The Work
Introduction The Overall Doctrine
Marx Becomes a Young
Hegelian
Class Theory
Parisian Days: Marx Becomes
a Socialist
Alienation
The End of Apprenticeship The Sociology of Knowledge
The Founding of the First
International
Dynamics of Social Change


The Sociology of Knowledge

In an attempt to dissociate himself from the panlogical system of his
former master, Hegel, as well as from the "critical philosophy" of his
erstwhile Young Hegelian friends, Karl Marx undertook in some of
his early writings to establish a connection between philosophies,
ideas in general, and the concrete social structures in which they
emerged. "It has not occurred to any of these philosophers," he
wrote, "to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with
German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material
surroundings." This programmatic orientation once established,
Marx proceeded to analyze the ways in which systems of ideas
appeared to depend on the social positions--particularly the class
positions-- of their proponents.
In opposing the dominant ideas of his time, Marx was led to a
resolute relativization of those ideas. The eternal verities of
dominant thought appeared upon inspection to be only the direct or
indirect expression of the class interests of their exponents. Marx
attempted to explain ideas systematically in terms of their functions
and to relate the thought of individuals to their social roles and class
positions. We must go astray, he believed, "if . . . we detach the
ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to
them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying
that in a particular age these or those ideas were dominant, without
paying attention to the conditions of production and the producers of
these ideas, and if we thus ignore the individuals and the world
conditions which are the source of these ideas."
Ideas, Marx maintained, must be traced to the life-conditions and
the historical situations of those who uphold them. For example, it is
not sufficient to state that the ideas of bourgeois writers are the
ideas of the bourgeoisie. Distinctions must be made between those
ideas that emerge at the beginning of the bourgeois era and those
that come at it height. Utilitarian notions in the writings of Helvetius
and d'Holback differed from those that made their appearance with
James Mill and Bentham. "The former correspond with the
struggling, still undeveloped bourgeoisie, the latter with the
dominant, developed bourgeoisie."
It is with revolutionary ideas as it is with conservative ideas. "The
existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular age presupposes the
existence of a revolutionary class." "The ruling ideas of each age
have ever been the ideas of the ruling class. When people speak of
ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that
within the old society the elements of a new one have been created,
and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the
dissolution of the old conditions of existence."
The ideologists and the political representatives of a class need not
share in all the material characteristics of that class, but they share
and express the overall cast of mind.
One [must not] imagine that the democratic representatives are
indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers.
According to their education and their individual position they may
be as far apart as heaven from earth. What makes them
representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds
they do not go beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond
in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same
problems and solutions to which material interest and social position
drive the latter practically.
Moreover, Marx granted that particular individuals might not always
think in terms of class interests, that they "are not 'always'
influenced in their attitude by the class to which they belong." But
categories of people, as distinct from individuals, are so influenced.
In his more polemical writings Marx used his functional analysis of
the relations between ideas and the social position of their
proponents as a means of unmasking and debunking specific
opponents and specific ideas. His aims were wider, however. Karl
Mannheim perceived this when he wrote:
[Marx's] undertaking . . . could reach its final goal only when the
interest-bound nature of ideas, the dependence of 'thought' on
'existence,' was brought to light, not merely as regards certain
selected ideas of the ruling class, but in such a way that the entire
'ideological superstructure' . . . appeared as dependent upon
sociological reality. What was to be done was to demonstrate the
existentially determined nature of an entire system of
Weltanschauung, rather than of this or that individual idea.
In Marx's later writings, and in particular in a remarkable series of
Engels' letters that date from the 1890's, some of the sharp edges of
earlier polemical writings were smoothed out. Marx and Engels were
now led to repudiate the idea that the economic "infrastructure"
alone determined the character of the "superstructure" of ideas and
only held onto the assertion that it "ultimately" or "in the last
analysis" was the determining factor.
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately
determinant element in history is the production and reproduction of
real life. . . . Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the
economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that
proposition into a meaningless, abstract and senseless phrase. The
economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the
superstructure . . . also exercise their influence upon the course of
the historical struggle and in many cases preponderate in
determining their form.
In their later writings, both Marx and Engels were led to grant a
certain degree of intrinsic autonomy to the development of legal,
political, religious, literary, and artistic ideas. They now stressed that
mathematics and the natural sciences were exempt from the direct
influence of the social and economic infrastructure, and they now
granted that superstructures were not only mere reflections of
infrastructures, but could in turn react upon them. The Marxian
thesis interpreted in this way gained considerable flexibility, although
it also lost some of its distinctive qualities