Karl_Marx

Karl Marx’s Biography and Contributions to Sociology The first of our classic visions of society comes from the philosopher, social scientist, and historian, Karl Marx. Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Trier, Rhenish Prussia (present-day Germany), on May 5, 1818. Although his family was Jewish, they converted to Christianity so that his father could pursue his career as a lawyer in the face of Prussia's anti-Jewish laws (Wolff, 2011). At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn, as it was his father's desire that he become a lawyer (Kreis, 2008). Marx, however, was more interested in philosophy and literature than in law. He spent a year at Bonn, studying little but partying and drinking a lot. He also piled up heavy debts. The following year Marx's father sent him to the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. In Berlin, a circle of brilliant thinkers challenged existing institutions and ideas, including religion, philosophy, ethics, and politics. Marx joined this group of radical thinkers wholeheartedly. He spent more than four years in Berlin, completing his studies with a doctoral degree in March 1841. Following the completion of his studies, he became a journalist in Cologne. In October 1842, he became editor of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper backed by industrialists, where he began to use Hegelian concepts of dialectical materialism to influence his ideas on socialism. However, the Berlin government prohibited the paper from being published (Kreis, 2008). In 1843, Marx moved to Paris and rapidly made contact with organized groups of exiled German workers and with various sects of French socialists. He also edited the short-lived Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher that was intended to bridge French socialism and the German radical Hegelians. During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which remained unpublished until the 1930s (Kreis, 2008). In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. It was also in Paris that Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels, a German entrepreneur, social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher. Unable to stay in France or move to Germany, Marx emigrated to Brussels in Belgium, where he remained for the next three years. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated on what came to be known as the materialist conception of history. He developed his study in a manuscript, which was published after his death, as The German Ideology, of which the basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of industrial capitalism with the replacement of communism (Kreis, 2008). At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he also wrote a polemic, The Poverty of Philosophy, against the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon (Kreis, 2008). These books laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, a political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. This pamphlet laid out the beliefs of the Communist League, an organization of German exiled workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels were the major theoreticians. Later that year, Marx was accused of financing Belgian workers who were planning revolutionary action to overthrow the monarchy and the establishment of the French Second Republic. The Belgian Ministry of Justice accused him of this act, later arresting him, and forced him to flee back to France, where with a new republican government in power, Marx believed that he would be safe. While in Paris, he soon found out that he was considered a political threat, due to his writings and insults within his publication Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and was later expelled by the city authorities. Marx sought refuge in London in May 1849 to live in exile that was to last for the rest of his life. It was here that he founded the new headquarters of the Communist League, and got heavily involved with the socialist German Workers' Educational Society. Marx devoted himself to two activities: revolutionary organizing, and an attempt to understand political economy and capitalism. For the first few years, he and his family lived in extreme poverty. Marx briefly worked as correspondent for the New York Tribune in 1851, but his main source of income was his colleague, Engels, who derived much of his income from his family's business (Kreis, 2008). From December 1851 to March 1852 Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a work on the French Revolution of 1848, in which he expanded upon his concepts of historical materialism, class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat, advancing the argument that victorious proletariat has to smash the bourgeois state. In 1864, Marx was a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association, an international organization that aimed at uniting a variety of different left-wing socialist, communist, anarchist political groups, and trade union organizations that were based on the working class and class struggle. Given the repeated failures and frustrations of workers' revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to understand capitalism, and spent a great deal of time in the reading room of the British Museum studying and reflecting on the works of political economists and on economic data. By 1857 he had accumulated over 800 pages of notes and short essays on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, foreign trade and the world market; this work did not appear in print until 1941, under the title Grundrisse. Marx continued to work on his volumes and manuscripts of his political economic findings until the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he became incapable of the sustained effort that had characterized his previous work (Kreis, 2008). Marx eventually developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health, which brought on bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on 14 March 1883. While Marx remained a relatively ambiguous figure in his own lifetime, his ideas and the ideology of Marxism began to exert a major influence on socialist movements shortly after his death. Revolutionary socialist governments following Marxist concepts took power in a variety of countries in the 20th century, leading to the formation of such socialist states as the Soviet Union in 1922 and the People's Republic of China in 1949, whilst various theoretical variants, such as Leninism, Trotskyism and Maoism, were developed. Marx is typically cited, with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science (Macionis, 2008). References Kreis, S. (2008, January 30). Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History. Retrieved April 15, 2011, from The History Guide: http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/marx.html Macionis, J. (2008). Karl Marx: Society and Conflict. In J. Macionis, Sociology, Twelfth Edition (pp. 97-100). New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Wolff, J. (2011, March). Karl Marx. Retrieved April 15, 2011, from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/