Karl Marx
Thinker · 1818-1883 · Politics, stage 3: Meet the thinkers
Explained politics by the organisation of production, and argued that capitalism generates the class that will end it.
Overview
Karl Marx trained in philosophy, worked as a journalist until censorship and exile closed that off, and spent his later decades in London writing Capital while Friedrich Engels supported him. His claim is that the way a society organises production shapes its law, its politics and its prevailing ideas, and that history moves through conflicts between classes defined by their position within that organisation. Under capitalism, workers who own no productive property must sell their labour, and Marx argues that the surplus their work produces is appropriated by those who do own it, which is the account of exploitation his economics is built to support. He wrote very little about how a post-capitalist society would actually be run, which is one reason the movements invoking him diverged so sharply and so violently. Start with The Communist Manifesto for the argument in compressed and polemical form, then The Eighteenth Brumaire for him applying it to a concrete political crisis, before attempting Capital.
Where to start reading
The Communist Manifesto 1848
Written with Engels for a workers' association: the class theory of history and a programme, in about forty pages.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1852
An analysis of the 1851 coup in France, and his most readable demonstration of the method applied to events he had just watched.
Capital, Volume I 1867
The systematic economic work: commodities, value, the working day, and the account of how surplus is extracted from labour.
Part of
Sources
- Karl Marx Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Exploitation Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Karl Marx Wikipedia
