Karl Marx: his thought and critique of capitalism, summary

Who Karl Marx was

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia, to Heinrich Marx and Henriette Pressburg. According to Encyclopedia.com he was the third child and first son of the couple: both parents came from families with prominent rabbis, and his father practiced law with some local standing. The Marx family had nine children, but only four survived infancy.

Between 1835 and 1841 Marx studied in Bonn and Berlin, starting with law at his father’s wish before turning to philosophy and history. He earned his degree in 1841 from the University of Jena with a thesis on the difference between the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus.

He had become engaged to Jenny von Westphalen in 1836, according to Encyclopedia.com, and married her on June 19, 1843, after seven years engaged, in a Protestant church in Kreuznach, according to Wikipedia. From June 1849 he lived permanently in London, where he stayed until his death on March 14, 1883, at age 64.

As a student in Berlin, Marx also lived through a less austere episode. One night of excess with Bruno Bauer ended with a donkey ride through the streets of Bonn, which scandalized the academic circles of the time, according to Wikipedia.

From German idealism to historical materialism

Marx’s philosophical training began within German idealism, the current that dominated German universities in his day. Marx first met Friedrich Engels in Cologne and then, decisively, in Paris in 1844, according to Encyclopedia.com: that meeting launched a partnership that lasted until Marx’s death. Together they wrote the manuscripts of The German Ideology, the text in which they set their own materialist method against the idealism of earlier German philosophy, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For the Communist League they later wrote The Communist Manifesto, drafted in 1847 and 1848. In that same year, 1844, in his earliest writings, Marx linked the relationship between man and nature to industrial labor, an idea that lays the groundwork for historical materialism, again according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Readers wanting the economic backdrop of those same decades can turn to the Recap on the industrial revolution, whose transformations of labor frame these early pages of Marx’s work.

The core of Marx’s historical materialism is that the material conditions of production explain a community’s social forms. The source, though, pairs this idea with the more cautious verb “conditions” alongside “determines”: a sign that even interpreters distinguish a conditioning from a rigid determinism.

Marx and the critique of capitalism: surplus value, alienation, class struggle

At the center of Marx’s thought is his account of capitalist profit through surplus value: on this account, the capitalist’s profit comes entirely from the value a worker produces beyond what he is paid.

Practical example: picture a worker who, in a day’s labor, produces goods worth more than the wage he receives. That gap, for Marx, becomes the capitalist’s profit: the mechanism he names surplus value.

Marx’s theory of alienation adds a second layer to the critique. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, labor in capitalist society alienates the worker along four distinct dimensions: separate layers of the same experience. Later interpretations of capitalism, such as neoclassical economics, start from premises quite different from Marx’s on this point.

The theme of class struggle, while not named outright in some of Marx’s texts, remains traceable through indirect phrasing, such as a passage announcing the start of an age of social revolution. On one possible reading, not as a certainty, Marx may have chosen guarded language in some writings precisely to avoid the attention of the political censorship of his time.

Marx, Engels and the publication of Capital

For much of his London life Marx was supported financially by Friedrich Engels, who in turn drew on the wealth of his own industrial family, according to Wikipedia. In 1850 Engels had settled in Manchester to work at his father’s textile firm, and from there he became his friend’s main financial support, according to Encyclopedia.com. How the two worked together beyond the money is the subject of the Recap on the Marx–Engels partnership.

The first volume of Capital appeared in German in 1867. The English translation did not arrive until 1887, four years after Marx’s death, according to the Marxists Internet Archive. Volumes 2 and 3 appeared after his death, in 1883: it was likely Friedrich Engels who oversaw their posthumous publication.