Marxism: theory, history, and critical perspectives

Karl Marx begins as an interpreter of the prior philosophy of Hegel, extremely popular in Marx's youth. Hegel espoused a philosophy known as "absolute idealism," which entails a complicated re-interpretation of Kant in order to arrive at a process which Hegel refers to as dialectic. The Hegelian dialectic proposes an original idea, thought or condition which Hegel calls the "thesis," this conjures its own opposite "antithesis," and the struggle between these two contraries eventually resolves itself in "synthesis." The result of the synthesis eventually emerges as a new thesis, and thus Hegel proposes a forward-moving philosophy of history, which Hegel saw as "unfolding the Absolute Idea of God."

Marx's philosophy is usually known as "dialectical materialism," which indicates his debt to the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel had after all proposed that the driving force of this unfolding historical process was essentially the "spirit of the age" (a sort of mystical atmospheric concept) but critics of his philosophy argued that this "spirit of the age" would be better analyzed in terms of its physical and material reality. After all, material conditions are one of the things that marks the differences in historical eras as the Hegelian dialectic unfolds -- how to account for them? Marx, working as a journalist and appalled by the oppression of workers generally across Europe in the 1840s, ended up siding with the critics of Hegel in order to insist that material reality was really the only reality. Meanwhile Marx derived from Saint-Simon and French radical economics in the early 1840s the notion that it was economic reality and class conflict that made up the chief material facts of history.

Certainly Marx's initial analysis of the Hegelian "zeitgeist" of Europe in the early 1840s was absolutely correct: in 1848, national revolutions spread from country to country across Europe, in testament to the oppressive conditions that Marx had observed. And 1848 was also the year that Marx would write, with Friedrich Engels, his short Communist Manifesto, which laid out an official set of doctrines and ideas. The fuller statement of his ideas in Das Kapital would have to wait nineteen years for the publication of its first volume in 1867, and Marx did not live to publish the succeeding volumes, which were edited and cleaned up by Engels for publication after Marx's death. Marx's dialectical materialism proposes an ongoing conflict between the propertied middle classes, or bourgeoisie, and the exploited working class, or proletariat. For Marx, the bourgeoisie -- who produced nothing tangible but who controlled the means of economic production -- were a parasitic class upon the labor of the proletariat. Marx characterized the working classes as engaged in "alienated labor," which he used to characterize the disconnection workers felt from their work, when the fruits were snatched up by the ruling class. Marx then saw this as a historical inevitability that the workers would rise up to seize the means of production -- "You have nothing to lose but your chains," Marx and Engels would exhort in the Communist Manifesto -- which would have entailed proletarian ownership of factories, etc. Soccio notes that the conditions of working men and women were so bad at the time that Marx was writing that "Marx seems to have confused the evils of industrialization with capitalism" itself (Soccio 386).