WikiPortallus: Karl Marx.html

Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818–14 March 1883) is the German philosopher, political economist, sociologist, humanist, political theorist, and revolutionary, known as the Father of Communism. His work addresses most contemporary socio-political problems; summarised in the opening of the The Communist Manifesto (1848): The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, positing that Capitalism, like previous socio-economic systems, produces the internal social contradictions that will destroy it as a way of life. ^[1]

As Capitalism replaced feudalism, Communism will replace Capitalism with a classless society emerged from transitional Socialism via a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. ^[2]^[3]^[4] Intellectually, he advocated a systematic understanding of socio-economic change; to wit, Capitalism's structural contradictions necessitate its end and the transition to Communism:

Socio-economic change occurs via organised, revolutionary action; thus, organised, international working-class action will end Capitalism: Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement, which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. — The German Ideology

In life, Karl Marx was an obscure intellectual, yet, at death, his ideas — Marxism — much influenced workers' labour-organisation politics. That influence was propelled by the popular victory in Russia of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the October Revolution in 1917; parting from that, few nations went uninfluenced by Marxism in the twentieth century.

Biography

Karl Heinrich Marx was the third of seven children in a Jewish family in Trier, Province of the Lower Rhine, in the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Heinrich Marx (1777–1838), descended from a line of rabbis, converted to Christianity, despite deistic tendency and admiration of Enlightenment intellectuals such as Voltaire and Rousseau. Heinrich Marx was born Herschel Mordechai, son of Levy Mordechai (1743-1804) and wife Eva Lwow (1753-1823), but when the Christian Prussian authorities disallowed his law practice as a Jew, he converted to Lutheranism, the Prussian State's official Protestant religion, to gain advantage as member of the Lutheran minority in that predominantly Roman Catholic state. His mother was Henriette née Pressburg (1788–1863); his siblings were Sophie (d. 1883) (m. Wilhelm Robert Schmalhausen), Hermann (1819-1842), Henriette (1820-1856), Louise (1821-1893) (m. Johann Carel Juta), Emilie, Caroline (1824-1847), and Eduard (1834-1837). His mother was grand-aunt of industrialists Gerard Philips and Anton Philips and a maternal descendant of the Barent-Cohen family, via her parents, Isaac Heijmans Presburg (Presburg, c. 1747 – Nijmegen, 3 May 1832) and Nanette Salomon Barent-Cohen (Amsterdam, c. 1764 – Nijmegen 7 April 1833), the daughter of Salomon David Barent-Cohen (d. 1807) and Sara Brandes, who, in turn, were uncle-and-aunt-by-marriage of Nathan Mayer Rothschild's wife.

Education

Karl Marx was home-schooled until age thirteen. On graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, he enrolled, at age seventeen, to study law at the University of Bonn. Despite wanting to study philosophy and literature, his father disallowed it, believing Karl would be unable to support himself as a scholar. The next year, his father had him transfer to the rigorous Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. In that time, Marx wrote poems and essays about life, using his father's theologic language, such as "the Deity", and absorbed the atheism of the Young Hegelians. In 1841, Marx earned a doctorate with the dissertation The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but submitted it to the University of Jena, because his bad reputation as a Young Hegelian radical would hurt him in Berlin.

Marx and the Young Hegelians

The university Left were the Young Hegelians, student philosophers and journalists orbiting Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, in opposition to G.W.F. Hegel, their teacher. Despite criticising Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, they used his dialectical method (sans theology) in powerful critique of established religion and politics.

Some Young Hegelians analogised between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy. One, Max Stirner, criticised Feuerbach and Bauer in the book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1844) (The Ego and Its Own), calling them pious people for being atheists practicing the reification of abstract concepts. The book impressed (Feuerbach-follower) Karl Marx to abandon Feuerbach's materialism. That epistemological break allowed his conceptualization of the theory of historical materialism, against Stirner, in Die Deutsche Ideologie (1845) (The German Ideology), which went unpublished until 1932. ^[6]

Paris and Brussels

Towards the end of October 1843, Karl Marx arrived in Paris, then a headquarters city to German, British, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries. He was there to work with the German revolutionary Arnold Ruge on the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals). ^[7] Moreover, based on their 1842 acquaintance at the Rheinische Zeitung, Friedrich Engels was in Paris to show Marx ^[8] The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. ^[9] So, on 28 August 1844, in the Café de la Régence, Marx and Engels began the most important friendship of their lives, and a most important intellectual friendship in history.

When the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher failed, Marx wrote for Vorwärts, Paris's most radical German newspaper (published by the League of the Just secret society), generally writing about the “Jewish Question” and Hegel. When not writing, he studied the French Revolution's history, read Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ^[10] and studied the urban proletariat.

He re-evaluated his relationship with the Young Hegelians, by replying to Bauer's atheism with On the Jewish Question (1843), an essay critique of current notions of civil and human rights, political emancipation, and how Judaism and Christianity oppose human emancipation. Engels, a committed communist, guided Marx's economics studies, kindling his interest in the working class's situation. In the event, Marx became a communist, expressing in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (unpublished ’til the 1930s), a humanist conception of communism (influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach), contrasting the alienated working class under capitalism and the un-alienated working class under communism, where people freely develop themselves in co-operative production.

In January 1845, after Vorwärts approved of the attempted assassination of Frederick William IV, the King of Prussia, Karl Marx, like most foreign revolutionaries, was expelled from Paris. He and Engels moved to Brussels, where he studied history in elaborating the theory of historical materialism. Resultantly, The German Ideology (1845) posits that the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production, by tracing the development of the modes of production in predicting the collapse of industrial capitalism and its replacement with communism.

Paris redux and the failed June Days Uprising

Later in 1848, Europe experienced much revolutionary upheaval; Marx was arrested and expelled from Belgium; meantime, revolutionaries deposed King Louis-Philippe in France, and invited Marx's Parisian return, where he witnessed the June Days Uprising.

Cologne and re-exiled from Germany

When that collapsed, Marx returned to Cologne in 1849, and began publishing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (New Rhenish Newspaper), during the editorial existence of which, newspaper editor Karl Marx was twice tried; first, on 7 February 1849, for a press mis-demeanour crime; second, on 8 February 1849, for incitement to armed rebellion; and was twice acquitted. In the event, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung soon was suppressed, editor Marx was deported to Paris, that city refused him refuge, so deporting him to London, a political refugee from the Continent.

London

In May of 1849, Karl Marx moved to London and established perpetual British residence. In 1851, he earned his keep, briefly, as a New York Tribune correspondent. ^[12] In 1855, the Marx family suffered the death of tubercular son Edgar. ^[13] Meanwhile progress in the political economy work was slow; by 1857 the eight-hundred-page manuscript covered Capital, Landed Property, Wage Labour, the State, Foreign Trade, and the World Market; it was published in 1941, as Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy), its short title is Grundrisse. In 1859, he published Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the first, serious economics work. As a news reporter, Karl Marx championed the Union cause in the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865).

In the early 1860s he composed three volumes; (i) Theories of Surplus Value (about political economy theorists, especially Adam Smith and David Ricardo), that Editor Karl Kautsky published after Marx's death; informally it is "the Fourth Book" of Das Kapital (Capital), and is among the first comprehensive treatises about the history of economic thought. In 1867, Das Kapital (in three volumes) was published; Volume I (1867) analyses the capitalist process of production, by expositing the Labor Theory of Value, of surplus value, and of exploitation that, ultimately, leads to a falling profit-rate, and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III (1885–1894) remained manuscripts, continually developed for the rest of his life; Friedrich Engels completed (from Marx's notes) and published them.

Publication of Capital was slow because Marx worked the First International, and was elected to the original General Council in 1864, being especially active in preparing the International's annual congresses and leading the internecine fight with the anarchist wing of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). He won, but, the 1872 transference of the General Council seat, from London to New York (which he supported), led to the International's decline. The International's zenith was the Paris Commune of 1871, wherein Parisians rebelled against the French Government, controlling the city for two months, until its bloody suppression; Marx defended the Commune in the pamphlet, The Civil War in France.

Marx's health declined in the last decade of his life, and was incapable of his characteristic, sustained intellectual effort; despite that, he commented much about contemporary politics, especially German and Russian politics. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he opposed the tendency of German followers Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) and August Bebel (1840–1913) of compromising with the State Socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle, thus, compromising the interests of a united Socialist Party. Corresponding with with Vera Zasulich, he contemplated Russia's possibly bypassing the capitalist development stage and establishing communism upon common land ownership, in the style of the village Mir.

Family life

Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron. Their engagement was kept secret, for being opposed by the families; they married on 19 June 1843, in the Kreuznacher Pauluskirche, Bad Kreuznach.

The Marxes were poor in the first half of the 1850s, living in a three-room flat in Dean Street, Soho, London. Already, they had four children; three more followed; in all, only three saw adulthood. His principal source of income was Engels's subsidy, and income from weekly newspaper articles written as a a New York Daily Tribune foreign correspondent. Inheritances from an uncle of Jenny, and her mother, who died in 1856, permitted the Marx family to move to healthier lodgings at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town, a new, London outskirt suburb. Despite the family's hand-to-mouth life, Marx provided his wife and children the necessary bourgeois luxuries requisite to their social status and contemporary mores.

Marx's children with wife Jenny were: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–1883); Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1845–1911); Edgar (1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy ("Guido"; 1849–1850); Jenny Eveline Frances ("Franziska"; 1851–1852); Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–1898); and several who died before naming (July 1857). Moreover, despite being a man of the people, Karl Marx was a man, hence his disputed, uncorroborated paternity of Frederick Demuth, his son with housekeeper, Lenchen Demuth. ^[14]

Death and Legacy

After Jenny's death, in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him sick the last fifteen months of his life, eventually degenerating to bronchitis, then to the pleurisy that killed him on 14 March 1883. Karl Marx died a stateless person ^[15] and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, on 17 March 1883. The lapidary inscriptions read: WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE, the terminal line of The Communist Manifesto, and Engels' version of the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: ^[16]

In 1954, the Communist Party of Great Britain marked the grave of Karl Marx with a monument crowned with a bust of Marx, by Laurence Bradshaw; the original tomb was plain. ^[17] Eleven people attended the funeral of Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels said:

Besides them, there were daughter Eleanor (socialist, and her father's editrix) and Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue, his French socialist sons-in-law, also attended; Liebknecht (founder-leader of the German Social-Democratic Party); Longuet (a figure in French working-class politics); Friedrich Lessner (sentenced, in Cologne, to three years imprisonment after the communist trial of 1852); G. Lochner ("an old member of the Communist League", per Engels) and Carl Schorlemmer (chemistry professor in Manchester, Royal Society member, and veteran communist comrade of Marx and Engels); Ray Lankester, Sir John Noe, and Leonard Church; two telegrams from the French and Spanish workers' parties were read aloud and, with Engels's speech, that was the eulogy. Later, in 1970, grave robbers failed at destroying Marx's grave with a home-made bomb.^[18]^[19]

Marxism — Karl Marx's thought

The American Marx scholar Hal Draper remarked: there are few thinkers, in modern history, whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike. Marxism's legacy is bitterly disputed among the Leftist ideologic tendencies claiming to be its faithful, true, and accurate interpreters, among them are Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and Libertarian Marxism.

Philosophy

Per Marxism, it is axiomatic that human nature transform nature via labour, and then transform nature to labour power, because labour is a simultaneous physico-mental activity:

Not all people work alike; how one works is personal and individual. Work is a social activity, its forms and conditions are socially determined and change in time. Marxism distinguishes between the means of production (land, resources, technology) and the relations of production (the social contract entered when acquiring-using the means of production), these two concepts compose the mode of production. In a society, the mode of production changes, i.e. from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production. In a capitalist society, the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (e.g. a technology is developed first, its usage rules are developed second). The mismatching of economic base and social superstructure, is a major source of Class Struggle, i.e. social disruption and politico-economic conflict.

The social relations of production comprise relations among persons and among classes. As a scientist and a materialist, Karl Marx did not define social class as subjective (people identifying with each other), but as objective (by access to resources), yet, because the classes have discrete, divergent needs, they conflict and disrupt society with the Class Struggle inherent to human history:

A person's relationship to his and her labour power is examined in the Theory of Alienation. Parting from Hegelian Alienation, the Marxist, materialist conception of Alienation is as spiritual loss — that one might waive ownership of one's labour (world-transforming capacity) alienates one from one's Self. Commodity fetishism describes said alienation; commodities acquire independent life and movement, to which people must adapt, ignoring the existential fact of life that the bought-and-sold commodities only reflect social relationships. Under capitalism, social relationships of production (among workers and capitalists) are effected with commodities (including labour).

Engels said commodity fetishism is a false consciousness related to an Ideology — the ideas representing the interests of a social class at a given time — that is presented as universal and eternal. At best, such beliefs are politically functional half-truths maintaining a social class's control of the means of production — thus ideas are components of the means of production. Ideology might explain why a sub-ordinate social class believes ideas (e.g. patriotism, religion) destructive of their interests. Despite that, ideology communicates much coded truth about social relations among the social classes. Despite the absurdity of believing the business concept that commodities are more productive than the producing workers — it is believed. That belief — people are less than things — realises the workers' alienation from their labour-power under capitalism. Another false consciousness is Religion, summarised in the preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: ^[20]

In his Gymnasium senior thesis, the boy Karl Marx argued that Religion's primary social function was promoting solidarity. The adult Karl Marx recognizes that Religion's primary social function is preserving socio-political and economic inequality with a divinely-revealed inverted consciousness of the world . . . and that it is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms, once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. For the proletariat, unholy self-estrangement — the Loss of Man — is complete; for Germany, his conclusion is that general human emancipation is possible only when the proletariat suspend private property.

Political economy

Capitalism's defining feature is the alienation of the worker from his/her labour, and the resultant commodity fetishism. In Europe, the capitalist mode of production developed when labour, itself, became a commodity — when peasants became free to sell their labour-power, because they were land-less. Workers sell their labour-power when accepting payment for it from a bourgeois capitalist owner of the means of production (land, technology, etc.); workers who must sell labour-power are proletarians.

Marxism distinguishes between capitalists, the industrial capitalists (controlling the means of production) and the merchant capitalists (controlling the commodities produced). Merchant capitalists buy goods (commodities) in one market to sell in another market; per the laws of supply and demand there is a commodity price difference among markets. To profit from it, merchants practice arbitrage to capture the price differences among markets.

Capitalists take advantage of the price difference, between the price of labour and the prices of commodities, so that input unit-costs are inferior to output unit-prices, that difference is surplus value, derived from surplus labour — the cost differences between keeping workers alive and the commodities they produce.

Capitalism rapidly grows because of profit reinvestment (new technology, capital equipment, etc.); thus, the Capitalist Class is history's most revolutionary social class, for continually improving the means of production. Yet, capitalism, itself, is prone to periodic crises, and, in time, capitalists would invest more in technology and less in labour. Given that surplus value (derived from labour) is the profit source, the profit rate would decline as the economy grew. When the profit rate falls below a given measure, either a recession or a depression occurs, in such a crisis, the price of labour falls, making investment and economic growth possible.

This business cycles of growth, collapse, and re-growth would be punctuated with increasingly severe crises — its long-term consequence is the enrichment-empowerment of the Capitalist Class and the impoverishment of the Proletariat; yet, if the proletariat seize control of the means of production, it would encourage equitable social relations, and render the production system less vulnerable to periodic economic crises.

Generally, the peaceful negotiation of such a Labour-Capital social relations problem is impracticable, thus, its resolution is violent revolution — because the Ruling Class would not surrender economic control without a fight. To establish Socialism, there must be a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat; per the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875): 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 . . . ^[21] although peaceful transition might occur in democratic countries (U.K., U.S., Holland), in central-government countries (France, Germany), the lever of our revolution must be force. ^[22]

Accusations of Racism

Karl Marx has been accused of being a racist by Walter Williams, and by Nathaniel Weyl in his book Karl Marx, racist (1979).^[23]^[24] Specific reference is made to a letter sent by Marx to Engels in 1862.

Karl Marx has also been accused of being an anti-semite; Bernard Lewis, Edward H. Flannery and Hyam Maccoby say that the essay On the Jewish Question is antisemitic; and that he used anti-semitic epithets in published and private writings.^[26]^[27] Per these critics, for Karl Marx, the Jews embodied capitalism and were creators of its evils. ^[28] His equation of Judaism with Capitalism, and his pronouncements on Jews, much influenced Socialist attitudes and policies towards Jews. On the Jewish Question influenced National Socialist and Soviet and Arab anti-Semites; ^[29]^[30]^[31] and Hyam Maccoby suggests Karl Marx was a self-hating Jew. ^[32] Moreover, this excerpt from On The Jewish Question often is quoted as exemplar of Marx's anti-semitism:

David McLellan and Francis Wheen say that On the Jewish Question must be understood in context of his debates with Bruno Bauer about the nature of political emancipation in Germany. Wheen says: Those critics, who see this as a foretaste of ‘Mein Kampf’, overlook one, essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defence of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians.^[34] Per McLellan, Marx used the word Judentum colloquially, as commerce, arguing that Germans suffer, and must be emancipated from, capitalism, concluding that the essay's second half should be read as an extended pun at Bauer’s expense. ^[35]

Intellectual influence upon Marx

Karl Marx's view of history — denoted historical materialism and dialectical materialism — is influenced by philosopher Hegel's statement that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically, because history is characterized by movement — from the fragmentary to the complete and the real — towards rationality. Usually, the progressive unfolding of the Absolute is a gradual, evolutionary accretion, but, occasionally, it requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodic upheavals against the status quo. For example, Hegel opposed African slavery by the U.S., and envisioned when Christian nations would eliminate slavery from their civilisation.

Marx's critiques of German philosophic idealism, British political-economy, and French socialism are influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Engels. Because Hegel's idealist philosophy stood the movement of reality on its head, Marx's materialist rewriting of dialectics was necessary, in order to stand the movement of reality on its feet. The materialist dialectics are influence of Ludwig Feuerbach, who, in The Essence of Christianity (1841), said that God is Man's creation, and that the qualities attributed to God are those of Humanity — the material world is real, and Man's ideas of it are consequences of it, not its causes. Furthermore, Marx's revision of Hegelianism is also substantiated with The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845) — defining the historical dialectic as Class Conflict, and positing the Working Class as society's most revolutionary force. Earlier, his article "Outlines of Political Economy" in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (1844) influenced Marx to study of the workings of the capitalist economy.

Marxism posits that the scientific study of history and society permits the discernment of tendencies (social, political, economic) that predict the outcome of social conflict; thus, communist revolution is inevitable. Despite that, in the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach (1843), Karl Marx says: Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it; thus, the Marxist's activist dedication to changing the world with social change.

The influence of Karl Marx

The wide-range work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is a complex, scientific analysis of history and society as the relations among the social classes. From it, adherents draw Marxism — the grand, cohesive theory of history; nevertheless, Marxists much debate how to interpret the writings and how to apply the concepts to contemporary conditions.

Linguistically, Marx's adherents are denominated Marxist and Marxian, of like denotation, but unalike connotation. Marxist connotes politically-committed users of the conceptual language (mode of production, class, commodity fetishism, etc.) to analyse and comprehend a capitalist society, et cetera; and committed politicians advocating workers' revolution as the sole means to a communist society. Marxian connotes the quasi-committed academic adherent who accepts much theory, but rejects political responsibility for Marxism's practical implications.

It is important to distinguish Marxism from What Marx believed; e.g. in 1883, Marx wrote to French labour leader Jules Guesde, and son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of revolutionary phrase-mongering and of lacking faith in the Working Class. When the French workers' party divided into a Reformist party and a Revolutionary party, the revolutionary party leader, Guesde, was accused of acting for Marx; Marx told Lafargue, if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist. ^[36]

Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the Second International (1889–1916), for continued political activism. It was more successful than the First International; it comprised workers' parties, especially the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1914, the Second international collapsed because of defections to Edward Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism and the nationalist divisions inherent to World War I.

Fortuitously, World War I permitted the Russian Revolution of 1917, wherein, Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party (a left-wing splinter party in the Second International) assumed power after deposing the Romanov monarchy. That Marxist revolution mobilised the workers of the world to unite in the Third International (1919–1935), organised by the Bolsheviks. In Russia, Lenin was Karl Marx's politico-philosophic heir, with Bolshevism (Leninism), the political action program requiring revolution led by a Communist Party.

Marx believed Communist Revolution would occur in the industrialised societies of France, Germany and England — but, Lenin argued, in the age of imperialism and per the Law of Uneven Development (wherein Russia, despite an antiquated, agricultural society, has the most modern industrial concerns), the chain might break at its weakest points, that is, in the so-called backward countries, and ignite revolution in the advanced industrial societies of Europe, where society is ready for socialism, and which could then come to the aid of the workers state in Russia. ^[37]

In the Russian edition preface of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels say:

Thus, Lenin's revolutionary starting point; he and Leon Trotsky, always understood the Russian Revolution as a signal for a proletarian revolution in the West. ^[38] Trotskyites argue that proletarian revolution not occurring in the West — to aid the Russian Revolution after 1917 — as Marx envisaged, led to Joseph Stalin's rise. ^[39] This is the Theory of the Permanent Revolution, official Russian policy until Lenin died in 1924, and Stalin's subsequent development of Socialism in one country.

In China, Mao Zedong was Karl Marx's politico-philosophic heir with Maoism (his interpretation of Marxism-Leninism), positing that peasants, not only urban workers, could lead a Communist New Democratic Revolution in a feudalistic Third World country without industrial workers. Conceptually, Maoism departs from the Marxist orthodoxy establishing that the revolutionary transformation of a society can occur only in Capitalist-stage countries, with a proletarian-majority populace.

In Russia, Lenin suppressed the political and civil rights of the population in the name of struggling against Capitalism to establish Socialism. Under Joseph Stalin's rule, Soviet suppression of political rights culminated in the Great Purge (1937–1938). Ideologically, anti-Marxists conflated said Russian behaviour into a philosophic characteristic of Marxism. In the Capitalist West, this mis-percetion was politically encouraged until the end of the Russo-American Cold War (1947–1991); nonetheless there were dissenting Marxists — old-school Marxists of the Second International, the Left Communists who broke with the Third International soon after its formation, and later Trotsky and adherents, who established Fourth International, in 1938, to counter Joseph Stalin's claim of being Bolshevism's true representative.

Intellectually, the Frankfurt School broke with the early Marxists — including Lenin and Bolshevism. First, writing during Stalinism's ascendancy, they expressed grave doubts about the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian Class Consciousness. Second, unlike the early Marxists (i.e. Lenin), they rejected economic determinism. Despite its influence, the Frankfurt School's work is criticised by orthodox Marxists and by Marxians divorcing action from Marxist theory to reduce it to academic question. Other influential Marxists of that time include Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci of the the Third International; they and the Frankfurt School comprise Western Marxism.

In popular culture, Karl Marx figures so: in the book Marx's ‘Das Kapital’ (2006), biographer Francis Wheen reiterates David McLellan's observation that because Marxism failed in the West, it had not been turned into an official ideology, and is thus the object of serious study unimpeded by government controls; he is twenty-seventh in The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History; and in July of 2005, he was named Greatest Philosopher of All Time, the unexpected winner of a BBC listeners' poll in the Radio 4 series In Our Time.^[40]

Criticisms

Economic criticism

Capitalists present Capitalism as the more effective means of generating and (re)distributing wealth than are either Socialism and Communism and that the gulf of poverty between the rich and the poor — capitalists and workers — is temporary. They suggest that self-interest and the need to acquire capital are inherent to human nature, and not consequent to practising a given economic system, and that an economic system is society's fulfilment of human nature (self-interest and the need to acquire capital).

The Austrian School of economics criticised Karl Marx's inaccurate use of the labour theory of value. ^[41] In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Friedrich Hayek counters Marxism by positing that Socialist economic co-ordination problems would stagnate production, because the quasi-labour of planning would occupy labour meant for production, whether or not the control is Leninist or Democratic. Mr Hayek's adherents indicate the queues and chronic goods shortages consequent to planned rationing (in Communist and Capitalist societies), illustrate that, in the short run, the Socialist economy (Leninist or Democratic) can lock and fail, like the capitalist economy.

Moreover, despite the (temporary) socioeconomic gaps, between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the working proletariat, industrialisation (e.g. U.S., U.K.) economically propelled the erection of the middle class (temperamentally disinclined to revolution) and the Welfare State as safeguards containing any poverty-induced revolutionary tendency among the proletarian Working Class. When the Great Depression (1929–1939[?]) broadened Marxism's collective appeal in the developed world, capitalist governments established the Welfare State and Labour Law safeguarding economic recovery away from revolutionary Left-wing answers to said economic depression; yet, Marxism remained influential in feudal, industrially underdeveloped societies such as Tsarist Russia (the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution modernised the country), Imperial China, and post-colonial Cuba, et cetera.[2]

In the Western World, Marxism's intellectual reputation was diminished by the political repression and chronic economic problems of historical Communist states, especially after the collapses of the Berlin Wall (1961–1989) and the U.S.S.R. (1922–1991). Countering that, Marxists argue that the U.S.S.R. was a State capitalism economy, whose collapse leaves Marxism's philosophic veracity unaffected. Anti-Marxists argue that the Soviet Union's internal failings and subsequent collapse directly resulted from Marxism's practical failings. On the contrary, Marxists counter, the Soviet Union failed precisely because the U.S.S.R.'s Communist Party abandoned (orthodox) Marxism in Russia — a geographically-isolated, socially-backward, monarchy unripe for Socialism.

Karl Marx saw advanced modes of production — derived from mature Capitalism — made feasible with an educated populace and democratic social institutions; thus the withering away of the State under Communism. He did not suggest that a State might omit an economic-development stage (per Soviet ideology) and progress to Communism, but that Socialism is feasible after the capitalist-stage of economy; that would free the populace for political participation (self-government), so overcoming the Alienation provoked by technologic progress. In turn, the unalienated working class majority would politically limit society's ideologic control by self-appointed (monarchic, religious, military) economic élites.

Systematic criticism

Professor of Philiosophy Louis Feuer, of the University of California, Berkeley, respected many of Marxism's basic ideas, yet was critical of it. In the introduction to Selected Works on Economics and Politics by Karl Marx (1960) he posits that Marxism bears religious characteristics; Marxism depends upon fervent ideologic faith. That Karl Marx's enduring, positive, intellectual influence upon Western social and economic thought, especially in Western Europe and the U.S., is in the injecting of ethics to politico-economic analysis, unlike "objective-minded", contemporary politico-economic tendencies handling workers and capital as amoral things.^{citation needed}

From the Philosophy of Science perspective, Karl Popper criticises Marxism's theories for not being falsifiable, which renders some its historical and socio-political arguments unscientific; and for historicism — the relativisation of truth in a given time. ^[42] Although Marx and Engels mostly addressed the Western European development of Capitalism, Eurasian Russia, and most other countries, went unaddressed, and their non-European revolutionary activity — that revolution occurs as often in undeveloped countries as in developed countries — contradicted (orthodox) Marxist theory; most of Lenin's work, and that of Marxist and Marxian writers, addresses that matter.

In his political science works, Vladimir Lenin continually insists that successful Socialism in Russia depends upon revolution occurring in already-industrialised countries; buttressing that, Leon Trotsky developed the theory of Permanent Revolution — how revolution in undeveloped countries (Tsarist Russia) would succeed if simultaneous revolution occurs in the developed West. Based on contemporary Marxist writings, Lenin postulated that with Imperialism, the Bourgeoisies of rich countries are using their super-profits — derived from their imperial colonies — to bribe their homeland's Working Class with labour laws and welfare-state benefits. At Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin contradicted him, rescinded Permanent Revolution as State policy, and replaced it with the policy of Socialism in one country, his interpretation of Marxism.

Despite that, as Marx predicted, capitalist Western countries did suffer (unsuccessful) Right-wing and Left-wing revolutions — the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917, per the Russian preface to The Communist Manifesto — the German Revolutions in 1918, 1919, and 1929; the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919); the Finnish Civil War (1918); the Spanish Civil War (1937–1939); the April 12 Incident in eastern China; and the U.K. General Strike of 1926.

Addressing the Western misrepresentation of political repression as inherent characteristic of Marxism, political scientist Shlomo Avineri argues that the pre-capitalist economy of Tsarist Russia in 1917, its politically weak civil society, and the absolute, authoritarian tradition of the monarchic Russian State, that propelled the Bolshevik Revolution towards repressive, Soviet development.

Philosophic critics claim to have identified conceptual flaws in the materialist conception of history (historical materialism) — arguing that its intellectual base postulates that the mode of production generates every historical event and change.^[43] Thus begging the question: From where does the mode of production come?

In the book, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought — Volume Two: Classical Economics (1995), Murray Rothbard argues that . . . Marx never attempts to provide an answer. Indeed, he cannot, since, if he attributes the state of technology or technological change to the actions of Man, of individual men, his whole system falls apart. For human consciousness, and individual consciousness, at that, would then be determining [the mode of production,] rather than the other way round; ^[44] yet, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1843) Marx says: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. [3] Marx directly attributes productive forces, and their development, to human action, and emphasises the social nature of this economic development, based on necessity, hence, independent of their will as individual persons, reflecting the extant social conditions.

Left Wing criticism

The political Left criticise Karl Marx and Marxism by countering that Social Class is not history's fundamental inequity, by indicating that Patriarchy and Race are independent of social class. Although Marx does not suggest that class division is a more fundamental social inequity than is Patriarchy, since (as Engels noted) sexual division pre-dates class division, but only that history's movement is best understood in terms of class relations — of class struggle — and that Class Struggle is the mechanism of social change.

Moreover, the theoretic and historic validity of social class as an analytic construct and as a political actor are challenged; questioning, in this vein, Karl Marx's reliance upon nineteenth-century cultural notions linking science to social evolution, denoted as progress, noting that Capitalism is much changed since his time, and that social class differences and labour relations are more complex — citing worker stock-ownership via employee pension funds, in the U.S.

Critics of that analysis retort that the top 1 per cent of U.S. stock holders own almost 50 per cent of the stock in publicly-traded company stocks. ^[45] In the book A Darwinian Left, philosopher Peter Singer says that Marxism's view of human nature as highly flexible is incorrect. Buttressing that argument, is anthropologist Lionel Tiger's contention that Marxist States do not wither away, yielding power to the Proletariat, because Marxist Socialism fails to comprehend, that Man's competitiveness and despotic personality tendencies, inherited from primate ancestors, necessitate restrictions and checks and balances — against any one person gaining governing power and wealth — to safeguard equality in a Socialist society. ^[46]

Thus the Anarchists, Marxism's usual nemeses, oppose Marxism, even the libertarian forms, for being authoritarian, of missing the basic necessity of rebellion against authority, by concentrating on economic matters. (cf. Anarchism and Marxism)

References

Notes

^ Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-158591-6.
^ Karl Marx: Critique of the Gotha Program (Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume Three, p. 13-30;)
^ In Letter from Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer (MECW Volume 39, p. 58;)
^ Cf. first section of The Communist Manifesto on feudalism, capitalism, and how internal social contradictions determine historical process: "We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged...the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes ... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property." Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1848),The Communist Manifesto
^ Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1848), The Communist Manifesto
^ Several authors elucidated this crucial, long-neglected theoretical development, lastly Ernie Thomson: The Discovery of the Materialist Conception of History in the Writings of the Young Karl Marx, New York, The Edwin Mellen Press 2004; for a short account see Max Stirner, a durable dissident
^ Mansel 2001, p. 389
^ Wheen, Francis Karl Marx: A Life, p. 75
^ Mansel, Philip: Paris Between Empires, p.390 (St. Martin Press, NY) 2001
^ Mansel 2001, p. 390.
^ Sewell, William H. Jr., Work and Revolution in France. The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 p. 145 (Cambridge Press, 1980)
^ Karl, Marx (2007). in James Ledbetter: Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx. Penguin Books. ISBN 9780141441924.
^ McLellan, D. (1973) Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 274.
^ Terrell Carver:

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