Karl Marx
Read this biographical article about Karl Marx. It also explains a number of his views and gives context to the birth of his ideas about the social impacts of capitalism.
Marx's Influence
Marx and Engels' work covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a political and economic philosophy dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions (and it is important to distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx believed". Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. means of production, class, commodity) to understand capitalist and other societies, or to describe those who believe that a workers' revolution is the only means to a communist society. Marxism has influenced Christian thought, too, especially liberation theology, which argues in favor of God's special concern for, or bias towards, the poor and advocates that when the poor become conscious of their exploitation, they will then be empowered to demand and achieve their rights. Liberation theologians do not necessarily support violence as part of this process, although many have.
Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization collapsed in 1914, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary" socialism, and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I.
World War I also led to the Russian Revolution and the consequent ascendance of Vladimir Lenin's leadership of the communist movement, embodied in the "Comintern" or "Third International". Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called Leninism or Bolshevism, which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized Communist party.
After Lenin's death, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, seized control of the Party and state apparatus. He argued that before a worldwide communist revolution would be possible, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to dedicate itself to building communism in its own country. People who have not seriously studied Lenin's writings and the brutality of his rule argue that it was Stalin's Soviet Union and its policies that undermined the concept of Marxism in the Western world. However, the collapse of communism stemmed from its underpinnings as well as from its application beginning with Lenin. For many years, especially after the Second World War during the Cold War period, Marxism was popularly equated with Stalin's communism, which was a totalitarianism that disregarded civil rights.
Statue of Marx and Engels in Budapest.
In 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union and in 1938 founded the competing "Fourth International". Some followers of Trotsky argued that Stalin had created a bureaucratic state rather than a socialist state.
In China, Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could play a leading role in a communist revolution. This resonated with Lenin's views in What is to be done? and in the strategy of the Bolshevik revolution which reached out to three constituencies: Laborers, Peasants, and Soldiers, promising the laborers "bread," the peasants "land," and the soldiers "peace". This was a departure from Marx's own view of revolution, which focused exclusively on the urban proletariat. Marx believed revolution would take place in advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany, and England.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School. Their work is known as critical theory, indebted to Marxist philosophy and the cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.
The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First, because of Stalinism and fascism, they had grave doubts about the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by Marxists for divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise.
Other influential non-Bolshevik Marxists at that time include Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term "Western Marxism". Henryk Grossman, who elaborated the mathematical basis of Marx's "law of capitalist breakdown," was another affiliate of the Frankfurt School. Also prominent during this period was the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.
In 1949, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by reconstructing it through the lens of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to "Analytical Marxism," an academic movement which included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski, and John Roemer.