The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (164 page)

(1818–83)
German philosopher, sociologist, socialist, and economist. Marx was born in Trier in the Rhineland of Jewish parents who had converted to nominal Protestantism in order to escape legal restrictions. He was educated at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, and completed a doctorate on classical philosophy. He became an ardent
Young Hegelian
, especially influenced by
Feuerbach's
materialist analysis of Christianity, which saw religion as a form of
alienation
. In 1842 Marx began his career as journalist and propagandist, moving around frequently as his newspapers were suppressed. In Paris in 1844 he met his lifelong collaborator
Engels
. Intellectual landmarks from this period are the ‘Paris Manuscripts’ (usually known in English as
Economic-Philosophical MSS of 1844
),
Theses on Feuerbach
(1845), and
The German Ideology
(1846). These works are essentially about alienation, discussed in a materialist way but with little reference to the
proletariat
and without Marx's later ‘scientific’ analysis of capitalism. Marx became more directly political with the
Communist Manifesto
(1848), with its peroration ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!’. 1848 was the ‘year of revolutions’ in Europe, but Marx was unable to have any practical influence on them. In 1849 he was expelled from Prussia and settled for the rest of his life in London. Here he produced his main economic works:
Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy
(1859), and
Capital
(Vol. i, 1867; vols. ii, and iii published after Marx's death by Engels). He also wrote barbed and spiky comment on current affairs, especially in France, such as
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (1852) and
The Civil War in France
(about the Paris
Commune
of 1871). Marx and Engels helped to found the International Working Men's Association (‘First International’: see
international socialism
) in 1864, but killed it in 1872 when it split between their followers and those of
Bakunin
. However, socialist parties on Marxian lines emerged, especially in Germany, although in the
Critique of the Gotha Programme
(1875) Marx fiercely criticized the programme of the German socialist party for adopting slogans from
Lassalle
that Marx regarded as simplistic.
Marx's health was poor, as was his family, especially in the early London years when he depended on Engels' generosity. Only three of his seven children survived to adulthood.
Marx's influence has been immense in all the social sciences, and concepts associated with him are scattered throughout this Dictionary. Discussion of these concepts is therefore not repeated here, but
see especially
alienation; Asiatic mode of production; base/superstructure; capitalism; class; class consciousness; commodity-fetishism; communism; contradiction; dialectical materialism; dictatorship of the proletariat; factors of production; false consciousness; feudalism; forces of production; hegemony; historical materialism; ideology; imperialism; iron law of wages; primitive accumulation; primitive communism; reification, relations of production; relative autonomy; revisionism; surplus value; syndicalism; and withering away of the state. For Marxists and schools of Marxism, see also
Althusser
;
Bolshevism
;
Bukharin
;
Fanon
;
Frankfurt School
;
Gramsci
;
Guevara
;
Kautsky
;
Leninism
,
Luk´cs
;
Luxemburg
;
Mao
;
Marcuse
;
Plekhanov
;
Poulantzas
;
Shining Path
;
Spartacists
;
Stalinism
; and
Trotskyism
.
Marx's sociological insights (especially the importance of alienation in industrial society) are alive and central to political sociology. His economics, which he regarded as his most important work, is dead except to a few devotees. Most economic analysts agree that the Marxian
labour theory of value
, including of surplus value, cannot be rescued from its internal contradictions. Marx's historical materialism remains an influential approach to both history and philosophy. His work on French politics combines insight with invective, and destruction of myths with their creation, in a way that will continue to fascinate readers for generations to come.

 
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It was Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels
who formulated the original ideas, concepts, and theories which became the foundations of a doctrine which has since come to be known as Marxism, but which they themselves designated as ‘scientific socialism’. The relationship between Marxism and
socialism
is a problematical one, but there can be no doubt that Marx and Engels saw many of their contemporary socialists as ‘ utopian’ in the sense of being insufficiently objective in their understanding of how capitalist society was actually developing. Marx and Engels devoted their lives to the analysis of historical forces which they considered to be moving inexorably towards the eventual collapse of the capitalist system and a revolutionary crisis which would bring about a socialist transition and (eventually) full
communism
. They gave particularly close attention to economic processes and structures, which they saw as the key ‘material’ factors in shaping social structure and class relations, and also the state and the distribution of political power.
Yet within the various schools of Marxist thought which have emerged in the last century or so there is no agreement as to how much weight should be attached to economic factors in explaining and predicting broader patterns of social and political change. Marx and Engels have been seen by some of their followers (and indeed by some of their critics) as economic determinists, but other interpretations have stressed the mutual interrelationships of economic and other socio-political factors. This dispute has become central to twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism, which has inevitably sought to analyse and explain the actual processes of revolution which have occurred throughout the world (starting with the 1917
Russian Revolution
) under the auspices of Marxist movements and political parties, and has become entangled in arguments over the importance of political leadership and the use of revolutionary state power in creating a socialist (and communist) society. Marx and Engels themselves did not produce any detailed analysis of such issues, and this is one of the reasons why twentieth-century Marxists such as Lenin ,
Stalin
,
Mao
, and
Castro
have all been able to add their own distinctive perspectives to the development of Marxist revolutionary strategy. The fact that many self-proclaimed Marxist revolutions have in fact led to the strengthening of state power and (frequently) the rule of one-party dictatorial regimes, rather than a society based on human freedom and the ‘withering away’ of the state, has also stimulated much disagreement over the relative merits of different Marxist strategies. At an extreme position there are those Marxists who deny the claims of such dictatorial regimes to be seen as ‘authentically’ Marxist, and this has led in the Western world to a persistent search for more democratic and pluralist strategies of change, for example in
Eurocommunism
and also within some traditions of
social democracy
.
Marxism may also be seen as a distinctive approach to the analysis of society, especially in terms of historical processes of change, which has had a dramatic impact on numerous fields of study within the social sciences and the humanities. There is hardly any area of socio-economic, political, or cultural investigation which has not been scrutinized by the techniques of Marxist analysis. In particular this has involved the utilization of
historical materialism
as a rigorous methodological approach rooted in the belief that the structure of society and human relations in all their forms are the product of material conditions and circumstances rather than of ideas, thought or consciousness. It is the thrust of this argument which raises the problem of ‘determinism’ in Marxism, since an emphasis on material forces of economic production and the social relations of production (i.e. class relations) inevitably suggests that these are the key factors which have shaped, and which continue to shape, the process of historical change. In particular there is a positive attempt here to stress that systems of thought, including political belief systems and cultural ‘products’ such as art and literature, are basically expressions of the class interests and socio-economic world-views of certain distinctive groups in society. Thus Marxism's analysis of capitalist societies focuses attention on issues of power and domination from the perspective not only of overt political supremacy but also through the supremacy gained from domination in the class structure (which is seen to be linked to political position) and domination in the realms of ideas, values, and cultural norms.
The Marxist analysis of capitalism and the conditions under which capitalism enters periods of economic crisis that eventually lead to social and political revolution is exceedingly complex and is essentially economic in its orientation. As capitalism has continued to develop and change its character since the death of Marx and Engels , numerous Marxist thinkers, from Lenin onwards, have added important theoretical dimensions, relating Marxism, for example, to new conditions of global economic production,
imperialism
, and
colonialism
, and the changing position of the
working class
, or
proletariat
, which has always been seen by Marxists as the most severely exploited class of capitalist society, and as the main agent of the eventual overthrow of capitalism. In the last century the working class of capitalist societies has undergone such a profound transformation that it is doubtful whether the ‘classical Marxism’ of Marx and Engels can be applied without sweeping changes of emphasis. Equally, Marxism has often been politically successful in peasant-based less developed societies rather than in the more developed industrial societies of the West. It may be, as some Marxists have suggested, that the focus of class exploitation has merely shifted to the
Third World
, but if this is so, then critical shifts in emphasis in Marxist thought would seem to be necessary in the late twentieth century. Marxist thought in the Third World has focused on imperialism, colonialism, and post-colonialism.
The Marxist critique of capitalism places particular emphasis on the role of the institution of private property (of capital resources and land) as the basis of class exploitation and the dependency of employed workers on a privileged group of owners. And it follows that the vision of a future communist society embraces the idea of replacing private property by common ownership in the interests of all and exercised by some form of direct workers' control. Marx and Engels did not produce any detailed blueprints for the precise mode of organization of a future post-revolutionary society, and did indeed criticize all such blueprints as ‘utopian’. In practice, however, Marxist regimes have engaged in such a wide variety of practical experiments, and Marxist political parties have put forward so many different strategies, that it is impossible to identify one single agreed approach. In the end Marx and Engels believed that the tasks of socialist and communist construction must await the necessary conditions of historical change, and this raises the whole issue of how quickly or slowly capitalism would be transformed into socialism and communism, and also the question of whether such a transformation could be accomplished in individual countries or must become a genuinely worldwide movement. ‘
Socialism
in one country’ has become the actual strategy pursued by many of the Marxist regimes of the twentieth-century world (including the Soviet Union under Stalin), but if capitalism has become a system of global economic power, it is perhaps questionable whether a single country can ever achieve the goals indicated by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The recent collapse of many Marxist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s—including the disintegration of the Soviet Union— has cast further doubt on the capability of such regimes to survive in an interdependent world dominated by capitalist countries. ‘Marxism is dead’ became a common slogan of political commentary during these years. But an alternative diagnosis suggests that it is one particular political form of Marxism which has collapsed, and it seems almost certain, as capitalism continues to experience severe economic crises at the end of the twentieth century, and as environmental problems pose increasing threats for the very survival of the human race, that there will continue to be a significant measure of political space in which Marxist ideas will continue to be expressed, debated, and transformed.
KT