LIFE AND WORKS OF KARL MARX
KARL HEINRICH MARX (1818-188)
Karl Marx, A German sociologist, philosopher and “father of
communism” is universally regarded as the materialistic
interpreter of society. He was born in Trier, a small city of the German Rhineland, May 5, 1818. He grew up in a middle class Jewish family which had converted to Protestantism to escape the social difficulty suffered by Jews in German society. Marx’s father, a lawyer, played a major role in his life acting 1835, Marx entered the University of Bonn as a law student. In the autumn of 1836 he was transferred to the University of Berlin.
In 1841 Marx received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin, a school heavily influenced by Hegel and Young Hegelians. A Cologne publicist, Moses Hess, helped Karl Marx to be invited to write articles for a journal (Reminisce Zeitung). Later, he became its chief editor. During this period of his life, Marx’s work was shaped by his criticism of Hegel and Hegel’s dominance in German philosophy.
In 1843 Marx produced two major writings criticising Hegel’s conception of the state, A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and “on the Jewish Question” After making these critiques, he began to develop an outline of a theory of history and economic aspect-a theory which later became one of Marx’s most important contribution. Marx married in 1843 and soon thereafter left Germany for the more liberal atmosphere of Paris. There he continued to grapple with the ideas of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, but he also encountered two new sets of ideas- French socialism and English Political economy He developed the idea of political economy by reading the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
Finally Marx on as both his advisor and friend. In combined Hegelianism, socialism and political economy that shaped his intellectual orientation. At the same time, he me Friedrich Engels who became his lifelong friend, benefactor, and collaborator. Much of Marx’s compassion for the misery of the working class came from his exposure to Engels and his ideas. By May of 1844, Marx had drafted some facts related to classical economics and alienated labour entitled the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, One of the most major works ,in this works, Marx emphasised on the formal study of political economy and economic questions. Because some of his writings had upset the Prussian government, the French government (at the request of the Prussians) expelled Marx in 1845, and he migrated to Brussels where his work with Engels grew more frequent. One of the first writings of their collaboration was The Holy Family, a polemical writing which attacked the Young Hegelians for their conservative view of society and state.
Later Marx and Engels wrote on a manuscript entitled The German Ideology, which laid out the conditions of the break with German philosophy and outlined the overview of the materialistic theory of history. At Brussels, his radicalism was growing, and he had become an active member of the international revolutionary movement. He also associated with the Communist League and was asked to write a document (with Engels) expounding its aims and beliefs. The result was The Communist Manifesto of 1848, a work that was characterised by ringing political slogans. It was this work, which had an enormous impact on the worker’s movement throughout Europe. In 1849 Marx moved to London, and, in the light of his failure of the political revolutions of 1848, he began to withdraw from active revolutionary activity and to move into serious and detailed research on the workings of the capitalist system.
By 1859, he had published A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the famous preface of which is one of the most frequently quoted excerpts from his writings. Later, Marx published the first volume of Capital, his magnum opus, in 1867. The second and third volumes of this treatise were edited by Engels after Marx’s death. Capital created a stir and it was soon translated into French, English, Russian, Italian. Lastly, after a prolonged illness of lungs, his health failed and he died in his sleep at the age of 65. one of his most major works. In this work, Marx on the formal study of political economy and economic on the 14th March, 1883 in London at the age of 65.
Important Sociological Works
The German Ideology, with Engels (1845)
-The Poverty of Philosophy, (1847)
Manifesto of Communist Party, with Engels (1848)
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-The Class Struggle in France, (1850).
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, (1852).better
-Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Three vols. (1867, speit 85, 94).
-Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, (1959).
Philosophy of MARX And Hegel
Marx and Hegel both are German and contemporary philosopher. No idea nor any intellectual understanding of Marx’s work is possible without taking into consideration the work of George Hegel. Hegel made a major contribution in the development of Marx’s philosophical and dialectical thought.
In fact Hegel was the dominant philosopher during the time in which Marx worked. In the early days of writing Marx can only be understood in relation to Hegel’s thinking. Hegel was the originator of one of the most philosophical doctrines of the nineteenth century refered to philosophical idealism. Collins puts it,
Hegel’s philosophy culminated the idealist tradition that began with Kant; it held that the essence of reality is reason, but that the spirit of Reason manifests itself only gradually, revealing more and more facets of itself during the course of time.
According to the idealist tradition, reason is the essence of reality and the spirit of Reason expresses itself during the course of history. This tradition began with Immanuel Kant and reached its Zenith with Hegel. Hegel also argued that history, the growth of Reason to awareness of itself, and the constitutional, legalistic state, is the culmination of history. Idealism can be defined as a as a philosophical perspective put forward the idea that the ultimate conditions of human existence and development can be arrived at only through the examination of abstract philosophic categories.
As a philosophical perspective, idealism had claimed that the fundamental task of philosophy and social thought was to understand human existence by an examination of abstract categories such as being, reason, history and spirit. The importance of Hegel’s observation was that it viewed the world, existence and being in terms of interrelated processes rather than seeing individuals and history as seperate free-standing entities. The terms Hegel used to denote the interconnectedness between the human and historical realms were spirit, reason, being and History. In essence, Hegel assumed that the abstract categories of history, spirit and reason were the ultimate subject matter of philosophic investigation. This led to the fact that the world of everyday experience was not an philosophic contemplation. Marx’s rejection of Hegel’s philosophic viewpoint was central to his thinking and firstly made it in his early work- The Holy Family.
In fact, Marx wanted to develop an understanding of reality and history. Therefore, Marx went on to outline the various conditions to reject the Hegel’s philosophical idealism on the basis of four central theoretical premises.
First, Marx objected on the position that the fundamental task of philosophy was to examine the role played by the abstract categories of history and spirit in human development. Marx argued that Hegel’s idealist view led to a fundamental misunderstanding of human existence because it led to the conclusion that only philosophic categories are real, In fact Marx took the view that the categories put forward by idealist philosophers referred neither to concrete human activity nor to physical reality, but only to grasped as ideas. Marx believed that when the existence of human beings is understood only as “ideas and thought” the more real and practical problems of individual lives are overlooked.
Second, Marx disagreed with Hegel over the role of ideas in history. Hegel had stressed the centrality of reason in human history and had placed theoretical emphasis on the category of the ‘ideas’. He also believed that human reason was the highest good. Contrary to that, Marx thought that individuals have physical needs and requirements which sustain their life and wellbeing that could only be fulfilled by the material needs. Hence materialism, for Marx, stands in opposition to idealism.
Third point of Marx’s disagreement of Hegel’s view is on the ultimate role of society and the state. Hegel’s philosophical perspective took a conservative view of history and society. Hegel thought that society and the state had developed out of what he called the forces of the spirit in history and the actualisation of the ethical. In this way, Hegel had supported the state with a kind of eternal quality in its activities that were unalterable. Marx rejected this view by stating that Hegel had created the illusion that inequality and human hardship were natural outcomes of history rather than resulting from natural disadvantages and historical social inequalities of society.
The fourth point of disagreement of Hegel’s understanding of human hardship and social inequality itself. Hegel had claimed that hardship and suffering stem from a kind of consciousness existing in the minds of individuals rather than in the form of material obstacles which exist in reality and hinder individual freedom. For Marx, the answer to social inequality and human hardship lay not in abstract forces of the development of consciousness, but rather in the concrete material conditions which make it necessary for one class of persons to be dominant over others.
Marx’s criticism of German idealism laid down a new theoretical Framework to understand society and history is fermed as the materialist perspective. Marx was interested in the analysis of the nature and meaning as well as the truth of history on the basis of ‘materialistic’ interpretation rather than Hegelian idealism. Materialism is a theoretical perspective which looks at human problems by studying the real conditions of human existence. It is the most basic premise of materialism that the very first thing human beings must do is to satisfy their material needs of food, shelter and clothing. Materialism, therefore, may be defined as a theoretical perspective in which human beings must satisfy their everyday economic needs through their physical labour and practical productive activities. This materialistic emphasis appears to be a passionate reaction of Marx to Hegel’s idealistic interpretation of history which attributed a major determining role to the progressive evolution of ideas. Hence, materialism has taken as its starting point the most basic human act-economic production.
METHODOLOGY
According to Marx, speculation is no basis for science: science musters a sound basis of facts. 1he premises from which he himself begins “are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises, from which abstraction can be made only in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity, and the material conditions, under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. And Engels state clearly, “must in each separate case bring out empirically and without any my situation and speculation and results yet to be proved appears to me to be disturbing, and the reader who desires to follow me must be resolved to ascend from the particular to the general”, and again, “We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process treated and analysed according to the existing empirical data, not according to The Concept of the Family’, as is the custom in Germany.
Thus. Marx, systematically and scientifically puts Hegel’s dialectic upon a materialistic basis, and views social evolution as a matter of material and economic forces. Hegel, more or less, thinks as proceeds strictly as anise materialist, or in more modern terminology, a “physical realist”. And, not even simply a materialist Marx is a dialectical materialist, and dialectics “spring in historic fact’’. We may finally note that Marx’s historical materialist method is no devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a movement. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation or defamation, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions.”
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