Karl Marx and Marxism

I. Marx and Engels

A. Karl Marx

1. Family--father was of Jewish ancestry, who apparently converted to Protestant Christianity--possibly to advance his career as a government official, since Jews were discriminated against even in the 1810s in Germany (and most of the rest of Europe).

2. Education--Germany was in the midst of forming the modern academy in the years before Marx began his education (which much of Europe and North America would soon copy). Received doctorate in Philosophy at 24.

3. Clashes with the Prussian government officials led to Marx being exiled to Paris by 1847, where he met Engels and other exiled German socialists.

B. Frederick Engels

1. Family--father was a prosperous manufacturer, with factories in Rhineland (western Germany) and Manchester (northern England).







2. Manchester--Engels was sent to Manchester by his father to manage the factory in Manchester, where Engels was introduced to the misery of the working-class first hand. As a result, Engels joined the Chartists and wrote The Condition of the English Working Class. Engels ended up in Paris by 1847, like Marx.

C. The Young Hegelians--Marx utilized the philosophy espoused by Georg Wilhem Hegel as the basis for his own new philosophy, particularly Hegel’s argument about the dialectic basis of history--but he also borrowed and adapted ideas from other Young Hegelians, who also reacted to the work of Hegel.

1. Bruno Bauer--turned Hegel’s notion that everything changes through contradiction into a liberal critique of the then-present German society.



2. Ludwig Feuerbach--developed the materialist philosophy (also known as Physicalism) that Marx and Engels relied upon to develop their own theory of historical materialism. Feuerbach argued that only physical objects possess reality, and in particular that spirituality was delusional. Feuerbach argued that man created god, rather than the other way around, and this resulted in man’s alienation. This philosophy goes hand-in-hand with atheism

D. The Communist Manifesto--became famous because of the events in the months after its publication (the various revolutions in 1848), but this work also laid out the work that Marx and Engels pursued the rest of their lives.

1. Alienation--the “market” was nothing more than the interaction or workers labor. A worker’s labor solidified into a thing, a product of that labor--but in capitalism, the object produced did not belong to the worker who produced it, but to the capitalist paying wages for the worker’s labor. The product of labor therefore became objectified, as Marx termed it, in exchange for a cash payment.

a) Alienation occurred because of the efforts of successive generations of people to wrest a livelihood from nature, and this led to differing relations between people, eventually forming into economic classes.

b) Marx and Engels argued that Feuerbach neglected the role of human agency in changing the physical world, which they set out to correct with their own arguments about alienation.

2. Historical materialism--Marx and Engels argued that every historical epoch was defined by the prevailing economic system (called the mode of production) determined the character of the social and political organization of that society.

a) Thesis--Antithesis--Synthesis--for Marx and Engels, society was continually undergoing a struggle for control, epitomized by the above formulation.

II. The Revolutions of 1848

A. The Specter Haunting Europe--Marx and Engels finished writing The Communist Manifesto in late 1847. In December of that year there was a brief civil war in Switzerland; that was followed by a brief uprising in Sicily in January. In February, there was an uprising by workers in Paris, forcing the king to flee and helping to create the establishment of the Second Republic.

B. Famine

1. Ireland and the Great Famine--the immiseration of the Irish peasant due to enclosure continued apace, and they were shunted to smaller and smaller plots and poorer land. This had resulted in the 1820s and 1830s in increased numbers of Irish leaving their homes to work in the factories of England and the United States, as well as building the transportation infrastructure.

a) Potato cultivation--despite increased emigration even before the advent of the potato blight, the population of Ireland increased exponentially during the early decades of the 19th century; according to the 1841 census, the population of the island was over 8 million people; in the 1851 census, the population dropped to about 6.5 million. An estimated million people died from starvation or disease during the Hunger; another million or so immigrated during those years.



b) The failure to counteract the Great Hunger--initially the British Prime Minister Robert Peel ordered that food be imported from the US and sold at market rates (which many of the poorest Irish could not afford); but under his successor, even these minimal efforts were abandoned, as the reliance upon the “invisible hand” of the market was going to deliver food to people who had no means to purchase it.

c) This same blight effected other areas of Europe, as well, but not with the same level of devastation and death. Other governments in Europe reacted in a similar fashion to that of Great Britain; this helped create a crisis of confidence in these governments, and to also create the political atmosphere that fostered support for the revolutions that followed.

C. Democratic reformers

1. Bourgeois protest--middle class protest stirred workers to take on the army and police in many cities in Europe in 1848.



2. Proletariat protest--just as in the earlier French revolution, when the lower class began to agitate for a voice in the forming government, the middle class (the bourgeois, in Marx’s term) allied with the upper class, and used armed force to crush the rebellion

Conclusion: From the results of the failed 1848 revolutions--the forces of reaction throughout Europe were largely able to regain political control, although feudalistic remnants of society were expunged, paving the road for capitalism to develop--the arguments of Marx and Engels and other socialists, that bourgeois democratic revolutions were a step on the way to control of governmental functions by the proletariat, gained a significant number of adherents.