Where is karl marx from

James Bradford "Brad" DeLong, professor of economics at UC-Berkeley, wrote in that Marx's "primary contribution" to economic science actually came in a paragraph stretch of The Communist Manifesto , in which he describes how economic growth causes shifts among social classes, often leading to a struggle for political power.

This underlies an often unappreciated aspect of economics: the emotions and political activity of the actors involved. A corollary of this argument was later made by French economist Thomas Piketty, who proposed that while nothing was wrong with income inequality in an economic sense, it could create blowback against capitalism among the people.

Thus, there is a moral and anthropological consideration of any economic system. The idea that societal structure and transformations from one order to the next can be the result of technological change in how things are produced in an economy is known as historical materialism.

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Table of Contents Expand. Who Was Karl Marx? Marx's Inspiration. Marx's Social Economic Systems. Marx's Historical Materialism. Using Marx as a Foundation. His Early Life. Personal Life. Famous Works. Contemporary Influence. Hegel — German philosopher. See all related overviews in Oxford Reference ». German political philosopher and economist, resident in England from The founder of modern communism, he collaborated with Engels in the writing of the Communist Manifesto Thereafter Marx spent much of his time enlarging the theory of this pamphlet into a series of books, the most important being the three-volume Das Kapital.

The first volume of this appeared in and the remainder was completed by Engels and published after Marx's death ; See Marxism. Karl Marx — is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than a philosopher, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is certainly hard to find many thinkers who can be said to have had comparable influence in the creation of the modern world. However, Marx was trained as a philosopher, and although often portrayed as moving away from philosophy in his mid-twenties—perhaps towards history and the social sciences—there are many points of contact with modern philosophical debates throughout his writings.

He subsequently developed an influential theory of history—often called historical materialism—centred around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power.

Marx increasingly became preoccupied with an attempt to understand the contemporary capitalist mode of production, as driven by a remorseless pursuit of profit, whose origins are found in the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. His understanding of morality may be related to his account of ideology, and his reflection on the extent to which certain widely-shared misunderstandings might help explain the stability of class-divided societies. In the context of his radical journalism, Marx also developed his controversial account of the character and role of the modern state, and more generally of the relation between political and economic life.

Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a series of modes of production, characterised by more or less explicit class struggle, and driving humankind towards communism. However, Marx is famously reluctant to say much about the detailed arrangements of the communist alternative that he sought to bring into being, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined plan or blueprint.

Karl Marx was born in , one of nine children. The family lived in the Rhineland region of Prussia, previously under French rule. Both of his parents came from Jewish families with distinguished rabbinical lineages.

Following an unexceptional school career, Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. His doctoral thesis was in ancient philosophy, comparing the philosophies of nature of Democritus c.

From early , he embarked on a career as a radical journalist, contributing to, and then editing, the Rheinische Zeitung , until the paper was closed by the Prussian authorities in April Marx married Jenny von Westphalen — , his childhood sweetheart, in June They would spend their lives together and have seven children, of whom just three daughters—Jenny — , Laura — , and Eleanor — —survived to adulthood.

Marx is also widely thought to have fathered a child—Frederick Demuth — —with Helene Demuth — , housekeeper and friend of the Marx family. Political conditions were such, that, in order to associate and write as he wished, he had to live outside of Germany for most of this time.

Marx spent three successive periods of exile in the capital cities of France, Belgium, and England. He was subsequently expelled by the French government following Prussian pressure.

Between early and early , Marx lived in Brussels, the capital of a rapidly industrialising Belgium. A condition of his residency was to refrain from publishing on contemporary politics, and he was eventually expelled after political demonstrations involving foreign nationals took place. In Brussels Marx published The Holy Family , which includes contributions from his new friend and close collaborator Friedrich Engels — , continuing the attack on Bruno Bauer and his followers. Marx also worked, with Engels, on a series of manuscripts now usually known as The German Ideology —46 , a substantial section of which criticises the work of Max Stirner — Marx also wrote and published The Poverty of Philosophy which disparages the social theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon — All these publications characteristically show Marx developing and promoting his own views through fierce critical attacks on contemporaries, often better-known and more established than himself.

Marx was politically active throughout his adult life, although the events of —during which time he returned to Paris and Cologne—inspired the first of two periods of especially intense activity. Two important texts here are The Communist Manifesto which Marx and Engels published just before the February Revolution, and, following his move to London, The Class Struggles in France in which Marx examined the subsequent failure of in France.

Between these two dates, Marx commented on, and intervened in, the revolution in Germany through the Neue Rheinische Zeitung —49 , the paper he helped to establish and edit in Cologne. This third and longest exile was dominated by an intellectual and personal struggle to complete his critique of political economy, but his theoretical output extended far beyond that project. Between and Marx also wrote well over three hundred articles for the New York Daily Tribune ; sometimes unfairly disparaged as merely income-generating journalism, they frequently contain illuminating attempts to explain contemporary European society and politics including European interventions in India and China to an American audience helpfully presumed to know little about them.

The character and lessons of the Commune—the short-lived, and violently suppressed, municipal rebellion that controlled Paris for several months in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war—are discussed in The Civil War in France He never succeeded in fixing and realising the wider project that he envisaged.

Volume One of Capital , published in , was the only significant part of the project published in his own lifetime, and even here he was unable to resist heavily reworking subsequent editions especially the French version of — In addition, the publication in —a previous two-volume edition and had only a highly restricted circulation—of the so-called Grundrisse written in —58 was also important.

His inability to deliver the later volumes of Capital is often seen as emblematic of a wider and more systematic intellectual failure Stedman Jones Anderson Marx died in March , two months after the death of his eldest daughter. The truth here is complex, and Engels is not always well-treated in the literature. Marx and Engels are sometimes portrayed as if they were a single entity, of one mind on all matters, whose individual views on any topic can be found simply by consulting the other.

Despite their familiarity, neither caricature seems plausible or fair. The attempt to establish a reliable collected edition has proved lengthy and fraught. In its current form—much scaled-down from its original ambitions—the edition will contain some volumes well over a half of which are published at the time of writing.

Texts are published in their original language variously German, English, and French. For those needing to utilise English-language resources, the fifty volume Marx Engels Collected Works — can be recommended.

There are also several useful single volume selections of Marx and Engels writings in English including Marx It identifies a distinct kind of social ill, involving a separation between a subject and an object that properly belong together. And the relation between the relevant subject and object is one of problematic separation.

Both elements of that characterisation are important. Not all social ills, of course, involve separations; for instance, being overly integrated into some object might be dysfunctional, but it is not characteristic of alienation. Moreover, not all separations are problematic, and accounts of alienation typically appeal to some baseline unity or harmony that is frustrated or violated by the separation in question.

Theories of alienation vary considerably, but frequently: first, identify a subset of these problematic separations as being of particular importance; second, include an account sometimes implicit of what makes the relevant separations problematic; and, third, propound some explanatory claims about the extent of, and prognosis for, alienation, so understood.

It is here that Marx sets out his account of religion in most detail. In their imagination humans raise their own powers to an infinite level and project them on to an abstract object. Precisely what it is about material life that creates religion is not set out with complete clarity. However, it seems that at least two aspects of alienation are responsible.

One is alienated labour, which will be explored shortly. A second is the need for human beings to assert their communal essence. Whether or not we explicitly recognise it, human beings exist as a community, and what makes human life possible is our mutual dependence on the vast network of social and economic relations which engulf us all, even though this is rarely acknowledged in our day-to-day life. After the post-Reformation fragmentation of religion, where religion is no longer able to play the role even of a fake community of equals, the modern state fills this need by offering us the illusion of a community of citizens, all equal in the eyes of the law.

Interestingly, the political or liberal state, which is needed to manage the politics of religious diversity, takes on the role offered by religion in earlier times of providing a form of illusory community. But the political state and religion will both be transcended when a genuine community of social and economic equals is created.

Although Marx was greatly inspired by thinking about religious alienation, much more of his attention was devoted to exploring alienation in work. In a much-discussed passage from the Manuscripts , Marx identifies four dimensions of alienated labour in contemporary capitalist society MECW 3: — First, immediate producers are separated from the product of their labour; they create a product that they neither own nor control, indeed, which comes to dominate them.

Third, immediate producers are separated from other individuals; contemporary economic relations socialise individuals to view others as merely means to their own particular ends. Fourth, and finally, immediate producers are separated from their own human nature; for instance, the human capacities for community and for free, conscious, and creative, work, are both frustrated by contemporary capitalist relations.

Note that these claims about alienation are distinct from other, perhaps more familiar, complaints about work in capitalist society. For instance, alienated labour, as understood here, could be—even if it is often not—highly remunerated, limited in duration, and relatively secure. Marx holds that work has the potential to be something creative and fulfilling.

He consequently rejects the view of work as a necessary evil, denying that the negative character of work is part of our fate, a universal fact about the human condition that no amount of social change could remedy.

It was suggested above that alienation consists of dysfunctional separations—separations between entities that properly belong together—and that theories of alienation typically presuppose some baseline condition whose frustration or violation by the relevant separation identifies the latter as dysfunctional.

For Marx, that baseline seems to be provided by an account of human flourishing, which he conceptualises in terms of self-realisation understood here as the development and deployment of our essential human capacities. Labour in capitalism, we can say, is alienated because it embodies separations preventing the self-realisation of producers; because it is organised in a way that frustrates the human need for free, conscious, and creative work.

So understood, and returning to the four separations said to characterise alienated labour, we can see that it is the implicit claim about human nature the fourth separation which identifies the other three separations as dysfunctional.

If one subscribed to the same formal model of alienation and self-realisation, but held a different account of the substance of human nature, very different claims about work in capitalist society might result.

Imagine a theorist who held that human beings were solitary, egoistic creatures, by nature. That theorist could accept that work in capitalist society encouraged isolation and selfishness, but deny that such results were alienating, because those results would not frustrate their baseline account of what it is to be a human being indeed, they would rather facilitate those characteristics.

Marx seems to hold various views about the historical location and comparative extent of alienation. These include: that some systematic forms of alienation—presumably including religious alienation—existed in pre-capitalist societies; that systematic forms of alienation—including alienation in work—are only a feature of class divided societies; that systematic forms of alienation are greater in contemporary capitalist societies than in pre-capitalist societies; and that not all human societies are scarred by class division, in particular, that a future classless society communism will not contain systematic forms of alienation.

Marx maintains that alienation flows from capitalist social relations, and not from the kind of technological advances that capitalist society contains. His disapproval of capitalism is reserved for its social arrangements and not its material accomplishments. Industry and technology are understood as part of the solution to, and not the source of, social problems.

There are many opportunities for scepticism here. In the present context, many struggle to see how the kind of large-scale industrial production that would presumably characterise communist society—communism purportedly being more productive than capitalism—would avoid alienation in work. Interesting responses to such concerns have been put forward, but they have typically come from commentators rather than from Marx himself Kandiyali Bauer had recently written against Jewish emancipation, from an atheist perspective, arguing that the religion of both Jews and Christians was a barrier to emancipation.

In responding to Bauer, Marx makes one of the most enduring arguments from his early writings, by means of introducing a distinction between political emancipation—essentially the grant of liberal rights and liberties—and human emancipation. However, pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier.

Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore, liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility—for Marx, the fact—that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people.

It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of liberal rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation.

Now we should be clear that Marx does not oppose political emancipation, for he sees that liberalism is a great improvement on the systems of feudalism and religious prejudice and discrimination which existed in the Germany of his day. Nevertheless, such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation.

Unfortunately, Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it is clear that it is closely related to the ideas of non-alienated labour and meaningful community.

Three concerns are briefly addressed here. The once-popular suggestion that Marx only wrote about alienation in his early writings—his published and unpublished works from the early s—is not sustained by the textual evidence. However, the theoretical role that the concept of alienation plays in his writings might still be said to evolve. A second concern is the role of human nature in the interpretation of alienation offered here.

However, there is much evidence against this purported later rejection of human nature see Geras To provide for the latter, a society must satisfy not only basic needs for sustenance, warmth and shelter, certain climatic conditions, physical exercise, basic hygiene, procreation and sexual activity , but also less basic needs, both those that are not always appreciated to be part of his account for recreation, culture, intellectual stimulation, artistic expression, emotional satisfaction, and aesthetic pleasure , and those that Marx is more often associated with for fulfilling work and meaningful community Leopold — These two forms of alienation can be exemplified separately or conjointly in the lives of particular individuals or societies Hardimon — Marx seems to allow that these two forms of alienation are conceptually distinct, but assumes that in capitalist societies they are typically found together.

Indeed, he often appears to think of subjective alienation as tracking the objective variant. That said, Marx does allow that they can come apart sociologically. Marx did not set out his theory of history in great detail. Accordingly, it has to be constructed from a variety of texts, both those where he attempts to apply a theoretical analysis to past and future historical events, and those of a more purely theoretical nature.

However, the manuscripts collected together as The German Ideology , co-written with Engels in , are also a much used early source. Cohen Cohen [], , who builds on the interpretation of the early Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov — Plekhanov [].

However, some scholars believe that the interpretation that we shall focus on is faulty precisely for its insistence on a mechanical model and its lack of attention to the dialectic. Hence it does not follow that Marx himself thought that the concept of class struggle was relatively unimportant. Furthermore, when A Critique of Political Economy was replaced by Capital , Marx made no attempt to keep the Preface in print, and its content is reproduced just as a very much abridged footnote in Capital.

Materialism is complimented for understanding the physical reality of the world, but is criticised for ignoring the active role of the human subject in creating the world we perceive. Idealism, at least as developed by Hegel, understands the active nature of the human subject, but confines it to thought or contemplation: the world is created through the categories we impose upon it.

Marx's writings gained popularity in the late 19th century, after Marxism became the official ideology of the German Social Democrats, which is Germany's oldest political party, according to Deutsche Welle. Vladimir Lenin was heavily influenced by Marx's work and became the leading figure of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Communist revolutions influenced by Marx's writing spread elsewhere in the world during the 20th century, most notably in China, North Korea, Cuba and southeast Asia.

This eventually led to the onset of the Cold War, a period of geopolitical tension for nuclear dominance between democratic, capitalist governments such as the U.

Related: North Korea: A hermit country from above photos. In , approximately 1. Marx's association with the enemies of the U. Historians continue to debate about the extent to which Marx can be blamed for the governments that claimed inspiration from his writings. Regimes associated with Marxism committed many atrocities over the century, although Marx himself never advocated such measures. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century, Marxism was widely regarded as a failed ideology.

In a speech , president Ronald Reagan, quoting novelist John dos Passos, said: "Not only has Marxism failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food. Toward the end of the 20th century, many communist regimes either collapsed, such as the Soviet Union, or adapted.

For example, the ruling Chinese Communist Party was heavily influenced by Marxism, but its huge economy is now market-orientated. Other countries whose ruling governments derive from communist and Marxist ideology include Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea.