HCJ: Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Marx is someone everyone will know, he's a bit of a cliche. He's known as the nation's favourite philosopher. The Daily Mail even ran a double page spread titled 'Marx: The monster' and went on to tell how he was the most dangerous person to ever live.

He wrote the Communist Manifesto which is known as one of the most important documents ever written and is said to be the most dangerous thing that has ever been written down. It was 1848 when the Communist Manifesto was written and it was enough to get him kicked out of any country in Europe.

Marx is pretty different from any other philsopher, he wanted to change the world. He's a physcial and sensual philosopher. He concerns himself with the physcial being and real things; he's called the materialist.

Key Points

He was living in an age of revolution, right across Europe there was revolution and revolt everywhere. Marx felt as if the world was changing and it'd never be the same again. He was strongly influenced by Hegel; everything is in a state of flux, everything is changing. He was also influenced by the dialectic. History was heading somewhere; teliology.

Marx believed everything was economically determined, meaning you're driven by money in a way. For example, if you're going town, it would be pointless if you didn't have any money, therefore, the only reason to go into town would be if you had money. This has been reflected in recent politics when Bill Clinton used the phrase "it's the economy, stupid". Marx believes we think we are happy but we're not really happy. Imagine you go to the country where you cannot speak the language, you cant communicate to people, you can't read the signs. People can appear to be free but are in fact in chains. We don't understand why we're unhappy but the capitalist would say you may have a menial job but you can go and buy something that will make you happy.

However, Communism was around before Marx, he didn't even invent Marxism. It was an idea he developed, but certainly not one he discovered. This became the solution to the problem.

Historical Context

Marx was born to Jewish parents that converted to Christianity. He was alienated in his own country due to the political state at the time in Germany in 1818. The mid 19th to the 20th century is seen as the German century. Hegel believed Germany was the instigator of change, it was the best nation on Earth and it was bringing the zeitgeist to it's eventual destination.

He met Fredrich Engles in Paris in 1844; Marx got kicked out of everywhere and eventually moved to London until his death in 1883.  Engles became Marx's benefactor. He lived longer and could interpret his writing. 

"Philosophers have only interpreted the world - the point is to change it." Marx didn't want people to be passive, he wanted them to be active.

"The theory of communism may be summed up in one sentence; abolish all property"; recalled Locke in Life, Liberty and Property.

For Aristotle man is the rational animal, for Plato the political animal, for Kant the moral animal, for Hegel the historic animal. For Marx man is the productive animal. Mankind creates the environment it inhabits – ‘not a figure in the landscape, but the shaper of the landscape’.

According to Engels, Marx achieved a fusion of Hegelian philosophy, British empiricism and French revolutionary politics, in particular socialist politics.

He was scientific, he liked raw and proper data; figures and facts. He came to the conclusion that the capitalist system was amazing, but in this was the seeds of it's own downfall because inevitably, it couldn't be maintained. There would be a moment when everyone would have money, then no one would and it would happen again and again and eventually the system would collapse. He believed that for the first time in history, the poor were organised in factories, working for the capitalist system.

The real dialectic idealism was based in the real world.