Basic Theories of Karl Marx

Basic Theories of Karl Marx

Life and Work

Karl Marx - Part 1

Ernest Mandel

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818, the son of the lawyer Heinrich Marx and Henriette Pressburg. His father was descended from an old family of Jewish rabbis, but was himself a liberal admirer of the Enlightenment and not religious. He converted to Protestantism a few years before Karl was born to escape restrictions still imposed upon Jews in Prussia. His mother was of Dutch-Jewish origin.

Karl Marx studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Trier, and at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. His doctoral thesis, Differenz der demokritischen und epikurischen Naturphilosophie, was accepted at the University of Jena on 15 April 1841. In 1843 he married Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of Baron von Westphalen, a high Prussian government official.

Marx’s university studies covered many fields, but centred around philosophy and religion. He frequented the circle of the more radical followers of the great philosopher Hegel, befriended one of their main representatives, Bruno Bauer, and was especially influenced by the publication in 1841 of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (The Nature of Christianity). He had intended to teach philosophy at the university, but that quickly proved to be unrealistic. He then turned towards journalism, both to propagandise his ideas and to gain a livelihood. He became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper of Cologne, in May 1842. His interest turned more and more to political and social questions, which he treated in an increasing radical way. The paper was banned by the Prussian authorities a year later.

Karl Marx then planned to publish a magazine called Die Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in Paris, in order to escape Prussian censorship and to be more closely linked and identified with the real struggles for political and social emancipation which, at that time, were centred around France. He emigrated to Paris with his wife and met there his lifelong friend Friedrich Engels.

Marx had become critical of Hegel’s philosophical political system, a criticism which would lead to his first major work, Zur Kritik des Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (1843, A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right). Intensively studying history and political economy during his stay in Paris, he became strongly influenced by socialist and working-class circles in the French capital. With his ’Paris Manuscripts’ (Oekonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, 1844), he definitely became a communist, i.e. a proponent of collective ownership of the means of production.

He was expelled from France at the beginning of 1845 through pressure from the Prussian embassy and migrated to Brussels. His definite turn towards historical materialism (see below) would occur with his manuscript Die Deutsche Ideologue (1845-6) culminating in the eleven Theses on Feuerbach, written together with Engels but never published during his lifetime.

This led also to a polemical break with the most influential French socialist of that period, Proudhon, expressed in the only book Marx would write in French, Misère de la Philosophie (1846).

Simultaneously he became more and more involved in practical socialist politics, and started to work with the Communist League, which asked Engels and himself to draft their declaration of principle, This is the origin of the Communist Manifesto (1848, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei).

As soon as the revolution of 1848 broke out, he was in turn expelled from Belgium and went first to France, then, from April 1848 on, to Cologne. His political activity during the German revolution of 1848 centred around the publication of the daily paper Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which enjoyed wide popular support. After the victory of the Prussian counter-revolution, the paper was banned in May 1849 and Marx was expelled from Prussia. He never succeeded in recovering his citizenship.

Marx emigrated to London, where he would stay, with short interruptions, till the end of his life. For fifteen years, his time would be mainly taken up with economic studies, which would lead to the publication first of Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie (1859) and later of Das Kapital, Vol. I (1867). He spent long hours at the British Museum, studying the writings of all the major economists, as well as the government Blue Books, Hansard and many other contemporary sources on social and economic conditions in Britain and the world. His readings also covered technology, ethnology and anthropology, besides political economy and economic history; many notebooks were filled with excerpts from the books he read.

But while the activity was mainly studious, he never completely abandoned practical politics. He first hoped that the Communist League would be kept alive, thanks to a revival of revolution. When this did not occur, he progressively dropped out of emigré politics, but not without writing a scathing indictment of French counter-revolution in Der 18. Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (1852), which was in a certain sense the balance sheet of his political activity and an analysis of the late 1848-52 cycle of revolution and counter-revolution. He would befriend British trade-union leaders and gradually attempt to draw them towards international working class interests and politics. These efforts culminated in the creation of the International Working Men’s Association (1864) - the so-called First International - in which Marx and Engels would play a leading role, politically as well as organisationally.

It was not only his political interest and revolutionary passion that prevented Marx from becoming an economist pure and simple. It was also the pressure of material necessity. Contrary to his hopes, he never succeeded in earning enough money from his scientific writings to sustain himself and his growing family. He had to turn to journalism to make a living, He had initial, be it modest, success in this field, when he became European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune in the summer of 1851. But he never had a regular income from that collaboration, and it ended after ten years.

So the years of his London exile were mainly years of great material deprivation and moral suffering. Marx suffered greatly from the fact that he could not provide a minimum of normal living conditions for his wife and children, whom he loved deeply. Bad lodgings in cholera-stricken Soho, insufficient food and medical care, led to a chronic deterioration of his wife’s and his own health and to the death of several of their children; that of his oldest son Edgar in 1855 struck him an especially heavy blow. Of his seven children only three daughters survived, Jenny, Laura and Eleanor (Tussy). All three were very gifted and would play a significant role in the international labour movement, Eleanor in Britain, Jenny and Laura in France (where they married the socialist leaders Longuet and Lafargue).

During this long period of material misery, Marx survived thanks to the financial and moral support of his friend Friedrich Engels, whose devotion to him stands as an exceptional example of friendship in the history of science and politics. Things started to improve when Marx came into his mother’s inheritance; when the first independent working-class parties (followers of Lassalle on the one hand, of Marx and Engels on the other) developed in Germany, creating a broader market for his writings; when the IWMA became influential in several European countries, and when Engels’ financial conditions improved to the point where he would sustain the Marx family on a more regular basis.

The period 1865- 71 was one in which Marx’s concentration on economic studies and on the drafting of Das Kapital was interrupted more and more by current political commitments to the IWMA, culminating in his impassioned defence of the Paris Commune (Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich, 1871). But the satisfaction of being able to participate a second time in a real revolution - be it only vicariously - was troubled by the deep divisions inside the IMWA, which led to the split with the anarchists grouped around Michael Bakunin.

Marx did not succeed in finishing a final version of Das Kapital vols II and III, which were published posthumously, after extensive editing, by Engels. It remains controversial whether he intended to add two more volumes to these, according to an initial plan. More than 25 years after the death of Marx, Karl Kautsky edited what is often called vol. IV of Das Kapital, his extensive critique of other economists: Theorien über den Mehrwert (Theories of Surplus Value).

Marx’s final years were increasingly marked by bad health, in spite of slightly improved living conditions. Bad health was probably the main reason why the final version of vols II and III of Capital could not be finished. Although he wrote a strong critique of the Programme which was adopted by the unification congress (1878) of German social democracy (Kritik des Gothaer Programms), he was heartened by the creation of that united working-class party in his native land, by the spread of socialist organisations throughout Europe, and by the growing influence of his ideas in the socialist movement. His wife fell ill in 1880 and died the next year. This came as a deadly blow to Karl Marx, who did not survive her for long. He himself died in London on 14 March 1883.

Marx and Theology of Liberation

Karl Marx was born in May 5, 1818 in Trier (Rheinish Prussia). His father, Herschel Marx, was a lawyer, a Jew who adopted Protestantism. After graduating from a Gymnasium in Trier, Marx entered the university, studied jurisprudence at Bonn, and transferred the next year to Berlin. However his preoccupation with philosophy turned him away from law. In Berlin, he joined the circle of young Hegelians called the Doktorenclub (Doctors Club), which consisted of Bauer, Strauss, Feuerbach. They are also called the “left Hegelians”, and the greatest part of their attention was devoted to the Hegelian philosophy (McLellan 1973, 32).

After graduating, Marx moved to Bonn, he hoped to become a lecturer in philosophy. However, the policy of the government refused to allow him to return to the university, and in 1841, Bruno Bauer, who was member of Doctors Club, was forbidden to lecture to Bonn due to his radical views. This led to Marx to abandon the idea of an academic career, and he began his long career as a journalist (McLellan 1973, 34; 40).

At 1842, Marx began to write his critical article about the institutions of Prussian ‘Christian State’ in an opposition paper, Rheinische Zeitung. Marx and Bruno Bauer were invited to be the chief contributors, and in October 1842 Marx became a chief editor and moved from Bonn to Cologne. The newspaper’s revolutionary-democratic trend became more and more pronounced under Marx’s editorship, and the government imposed strong censorship on the paper. The censorship was so intolerable that Marx preferred to resign on 17 March. The final issue of the paper appeared on the 31st of that month. His criticism of the deliberations of the Rhein Province Assembly compelled Marx to study questions of economic and political interests. In pursuing them, he found that jurisprudence and philosophy overlooked the material conditions of life. Many years later, Marx wrote in the preface of Critique of Political Economy:

The first work which I undertook for the solution of the doubts which assailed me was a critical review of the Hegelian philosophy of law…My investigation led to the conclusion, firstly, that legal relations as well as forms of state are to be understood neither in themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life; secondly that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy (McLellan, 1973, 67).

In the summer of 1843, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, a childhood friend to whom he had become engaged while he was still a student. In the fall of the same year, Marx went to Paris, and devoted his study to political economy and the history of the French Revolution. At the same time, he published a radical journal abroad, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbucher. However, this was the first and last issue of this journal.

In September 1844, Frederick Engels came to Paris for a few days, and from that time on became Marx’s closest friend. Engels was the son of a wealthy industrialist but had been under the influence of both the radical Hegelians in Germany and the English socialists.

At the insistent request of the Prussian government, Marx was banished from Paris in 1845, as a dangerous revolutionary. He went to Brussels, and stayed there, pursuing the same studies. In 1845 in Brussels, he wrote one of his major works, Theses on Feuerbach, which were published by Engels. This work and The German Ideology, written with Engels in 1845-1846, indicate Marx’s discontinuity with the young Hegelians and the emergence of his own social and economical critique of religion (McLellan 1973, 152; 154).

In the spring of 1847, Marx and Engels joined a secret propaganda society called the Communist League. After that time, they drew up The Communist Manifesto, which was written in London in 1848, and adopted by the Workers’ Congress. In 1864, Marx founded the International, which is also called First International, and in 1867, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy appeared. If it had not been for Engels’ constant and selfless financial aid, Marx would not have been able to concentrate on writing Capital. Engels published its second and third volumes in 1885 and 1894 after his death (Livingston, 188). This work contains the results of studies to which a whole life was devoted. It is the political economy of the working class, reduced to its scientific formulation. Through this work, Marx attempts to show the relation between capital and labor. Marx’s health was undermined by his strenuous work in the International and his still more strenuous theoretical occupations. He continued work on the refashioning of political economy and on the completion of Capital, for which he collected a mass of new material and studied a number of languages. However, ill health prevented him from completing Capital.

His wife died on December 2, 1881 and on March 14, 1883 Marx passed away peacefully in his armchair. He lies buried next to his wife at Highgate Cemetery in London. Marx’s children died in childhood in London, when the family was living in destitute circumstances.

Some of his work are: Theses on Feuerbach (1845); German Ideology (with Engels, 1845); The Communist Manifesto (with Engels, 1848); Wage-Labor and Capital (1849); Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859); Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867); The Civil War in France (1871)

Religion as a Projection of Alienated Consciousness

Marx gets the term ‘alienation’ from Hegel and Feuerbach. Feuerbach builds his interpretation of Christianity upon the concept of alienation that lies at the foundation of Hegel’s philosophy. Marx accepts Hegel’s view that man can be alienated from himself, but he(Marx) rejected the view that nature is a self-alienated form of the absolute mind. On the contrary, Feuerbach argues, our idea of God is really just an idea of the human essence, and the essence of religion is men’s estrangement from himself (Bloch, 83). When human beings create and put above themselves an imagined higher being, they are alienated from themselves. Feuerbach says, “ What is positive, essential in the intuition of the divine being can only be human, so the intuition of man as an object of consciousness can only be negative, hostile to man. To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing”(Feuerbach, 26). Feuerbach also thinks of alienation as a form of false consciousness, a false view of the human essence (Livingston, 185-186).

Between 1841-1844, Marx remained a true Feuerbachian, and his comments on religions during this period reflect Feuerbach’s influence. However, Marx’s discussion of man’s self-alienation in religion was much more focused on analysis of the historical and economical factors producing such an alienated consciousness. In The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), Marx said that man has found nothing but his own alienated reflection.

Man makes religion; religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, and society. This state, this society, produces religion, a reversed world-consciousness because they are a reversed world. Religion is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality (Marx 1964, 41-42).

The religious illusions not only give a sense of the emptiness and worthlessness of human life, but also offer us comfort and consolation. Alienated consciousness involves two contradicting ideas: one is that human life is alienated, unsatisfying and worthless, and the other is that human existence is not alienated once we give it the right interpretation. Hegel and Feuerbach argued that people are alienated because they misunderstand the nature of the human condition (Wood, 13). Marx kept Feuerbach’s ideas of projection and alienation. Indeed, they appear frequently in Marx’s early writings. But he saw that Feuerbach’s critique of religion touched only the theoretical side of alienation; for him, it was necessary to attack the practical side as well. Because of their own fixation on metaphysics, Hegel and Feuerbach just saw the half picture of the human condition. Thus Marx moved from the criticism of heaven to the criticism of earth, from religious alienation to political and economic alienation (Norris, 19). To eliminate a symptom is not to eliminate the disease.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world…It is the opium of the people…The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness…Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth… the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics (Marx 1964, 42).

Religion as an Ideological Superstructure and Praxis

Marx explores the real origin of religious alienation itself and finds it in the dehumanized praxis of real social life. Marx’s criticism of religion is primarily related to social conditions, that is, to the economic and social alienation of man in a class society as the source of religion. In contrast with Feuerbach’s anthropology, Marx does not comprehend the sources of religion to be anthropological and psychological. He does not regard it as the result of the fear of finitude and projection into other worldliness. Above all things, he perceives the sources out of which religion stems as being society and inhuman class conditions.

In this, Marx follows Moses Hess’ analysis, which was the first to transform Feuerbach’s concept of alienation into a critical analysis of the economic and social system of capitalism. Hess had established that what Feuerbach proclaimed to be a religious alienation was only an ideological expression. He argued that the real alienation of man’s essence was based on the economic and social level.

The influence of Hess is most pronounced in “On the Jewish Question.” Marx understood a similarity between the alienation produced by the capitalist religion and self-alienation produced by Christianity (Livingston, 191). In Marx’s understanding, Christianity and Judaism, which he regarded as typical of capitalism, are the theoretical and practical forms of man’s egoistic alienation. Marx argued that, throughout history, religion (Christianity) has served capitalism as an “ideological” superstructure (Livingston, 192). In Capital, he shows the affinity of Christianity and capitalism.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour-for such a society, Christianity… is the most fitting form of religion (Marx 1964, 135).

According to Marx, alienation is real in which it consists, not just in people's beliefs and thoughts, but also in their objective conditions in the world. If we feel our world to be empty and absurd, or feel ourselves to be degraded, then that is because we are. He concentrates on the sociopolitical source of man’s distress. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written in Paris in 1844, Marx described the process of alienation in the alienated society.

(1) Marx argues that the worker is alienated from his laboring activity, because it is not the expression of himself but rather a means to prolonging his physical existence.

(2) The worker is alienated from the product of his labor, because it belongs to the capitalist and so the worker’s labor increases the power of the capitalist whose interest is in so many ways opposed to the worker’s.

(3) The worker is alienated from nature.

(4) Most importantly, he is alienated from the human essence, and so from his fellow human beings (Marx 1963, 127-129).

The self-alienated man is a man who really is not a man. On the contrary, a non-alienated man would be a man who really is a man. This man fulfills himself as a free, creative being of praxis. Marx argued that alienation is real, and we feel our lives to be empty and meaningless because we live under conditions which make a real life impossible for us (Wood, 14). The crucial problem is that alienated individuals lack the practical power to take meaningful action. In the fourth thesis of “Theses on Feuerbach” Marx claims the necessity of praxis in order to overcome human alienation. The concept of praxis makes Marx break with Feuerbach.

"Feuerbach starts out form the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of this world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done…The latter (secular basis) must itself…be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionized in practice" (Marx 1959, 244; emphasis added).

Marx argues that only a “praxis” which transforms economic circumstances can free man from his alienated condition. Marx understood that consciousness could not be changed within consciousness alone, but only by changes in material acts. The misery of human being is not caused by metaphysical ideas, but by alienated praxis that one can find in the ideological consciousness. Marx increases the importance of the social dimension of human existence based on the critique of religion as ideology. He concentrates on the social relation that is the point of intersection of political and economic relations, not an abstract relation. Marx concludes: “The struggle against religion is therefore mediately the fight against the other world, of which religion is the spiritual aroma…The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion” (Marx 1964, 42). In this light, we can understand the statement: “The criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”

One can say that Marx’s thought is congenial to Christian belief in some senses. Marx’s explanations of alienation and emancipation have a quite similar structure to the Christian ideas of sin and redemption. The hopeful future-oriented quality of this thought sounds familiar to the hope of the gospel.

Yet despite these formal similarities and positive critique of religion, the materialist orientation of Marx’s thinking based on atheism is a particular obstacle to Christian interpretation. Marx’s materialism raises an important challenge to Christian belief. If Marx was one-sidedly materialistic, Christianity traditionally has been one-sidedly anti-materialistic.

Even though it seems to be true that atheism is so essential to Marxism that Marxist goals cannot be achieved without it, if we defined Marxism as a social theory, the role played by his atheism becomes much less important. This is the starting point where Christians and Marxists (or Christian-Marxists) seek the same goal, which is the liberation from any type of human bondage. In this understanding, we can find various connections between Christianity and Marxism in liberation theology.

Marx’s condemnations of religion have a permanent validity and value when it acts to legitimize unjust structures or to pacify the oppressed. These censures have challenged Christianity and encouraged churches to be involved in issues of social justice. Many Christians who are motivated to work for social justice may not opt for Marxist revolutionary change, but they would agree that the theology has only interpreted God, human beings, and the world in various ways; but what matters is to change them.

Bibliography and Cited Works

Althusser, Louis. 1969. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon Books.

Avineri, Shlomo. 1968. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bloch, Ernst. 1971. On Karl Marx. Trans. John Maxwell. New York: Herder and Herder.

Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1989. The Essence of Christianity. Trans. by George Eliot. New York: Prometheus Books.

Graham, Keith. 1992. Karl Marx Our Contemporary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Livingston. James. 1971. Modern Christian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Vatican II. New York: Macmillan.

Marx, Karl. 1959. Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Political and Philosophy. Edit. by Lewis S. Feuer. New York: Anchor Books.

Marx, Karl. 1963. Karl Marx: Early Writings. Trans. & Edit. by T.B. Bottomore. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Marx, Karl. 1964. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels On Religion. New York: Schocken Books.

Marx, Karl. 1979. Karl Marx: Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Vol. 1. Edited by Frederick Engles, Trans. by Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers.

Mckown, Delos. 1975. The Classical Marxist Critiques of Religion: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kautsky. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

McLellan, David. 1973. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. New York: Haper & Row Publishers.

McLellan, David. 1987. Marxism and Religion: A Description and Assessment of the Marxist Critique of Christianity. New York: Harper & Row.

Norris, Russel. 1974. God, Marx, and the Future: Dialogue with Roger Garaudy. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Petrovic, Gajo. 1967. Karl Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century. New York: Anchor Books.

Stumme, Wayne. 1984. Christians and The Many Faces of Marxism. Minneapolis: Augusburg.

Tucker, Robert. 1967. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wood, Allen. 1981. Karl Marx. London: Routledge & Legan Paul.