by Abbie Bakan
In a recent BBC internet poll, Karl Marx was voted "Man of the Millennium." Over 100 years after his death, the ideas of Karl Marx continue to influence millions of people.
Capitalism has changed dramatically since the times of Karl Marx. But the basic drive of the system, the drive for profit, is remarkably consistent.
What is so striking about Marx's views, despite the claims of his critics, is actually how relevant remains his analysis of capitalism and his understanding of how to fight it
Marx, along with his life long collaborator, Frederick Engels, developed an analysis of capitalism and a critique of its inner workings that is no less relevant today than it was in the mid-1800s.
Marxism has been declared dead by western critics time and again. But as long as capitalism continues to exploit and oppress masses of workers around the world, people will seek out ideas that make sense of their experiences.
Marx more than any other thinker developed the most penetrating critique of the capitalist market.
He was a prolific writer. One of Marx's greatest accomplishments was the development of a detailed body of work that examines the basic dynamics of the system, expressed most clearly in his great work, Capital.
But Marx was not some grey academic hiding away writing books in the halls of the British Museum. The theoretical contributions of Karl Marx were the product of a combination of study and revolutionary activism.
life and times of karl marx
Marx was born and raised in Germany, from a fairly wealthy family in the German Rhineland. He studied philosophy and earned a doctorate degree, but he rebelled against his family. He had to continually face his father's complaints about his "wild frolics."
In 1843, even as a young man, Marx committed himself to a "merciless criticism of everything existing." Criticism, for Marx, was the core of all thinking.
Marx joined an organization of socialists called the Communist League, and participated in the German revolution of 1848.
He was forced to flee from Germany for his insurrectionary activities. He was tried for subversion in Germany in 1849 and stripped of his citizenship for treason. Marx lived most of his life as a political refugee in England, trying and failing repeatedly to regain legal access to Germany.
From 1849 until his death in England in 1883, Marx was followed and harassed by the police from Prussia, a state in the German empire. He wrote articles as a freelance journalist for the New York Tribune, and attempted to publish a socialist newspaper, The New Rheinische Gazette. This paper was suppressed by the authorities in 1849.
Marx used all his spare time to write and publish his work, while he and his wife Jenny and their children lived in desperately poor conditions. It was only through the generous help of Frederick Engels that he even managed to survive.
In 1864 Marx founded the First International Working Man's Association, which had 2000 people at its founding meeting.
Marx drafted the rules of the First International, which opened with words that well summarize his world view:
"The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves."
The image of a passive intellectual does not suit Marx, who loved political activism. When the class struggle was in retreat, Marx referred to his years of quiet study as the "sleepless night of exile."
Marx's world view
Marx's writings are not a dogma or a set of religious tracts, but a guide to understanding and changing the world.
The Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin -- introducing Marx to a new generation at the beginning of this century -- developed a marvelous outline of the development of Marx's thought.
Lenin described Marx's thought as a product of three separate traditions of radical theory which came before Marx himself. Marx, according to Lenin, synthesized these ideas in a unique and original way.
These three traditions were German idealist philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
These strands of critical thought were all part of the ferment of ideas of European society during the youth and maturation of Karl Marx.
It was in his criticism of German idealist philosophy that Marx began to develop his own original method. The most influential German philosopher of the day was Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel.
Marx was part of a following of young German students who studied Hegel's ideas after his death in 1831. Hegel saw all history as the development of contradictory forces.
All development was for Hegel the result of conflict, transformation, struggle and change. And central to Hegel's view of conflict was the contradiction between oppression and freedom.
For Hegel, the unity of the contradictions in the world would be overcome in consciousness, in what he called the "absolute idea." Because of the importance of the ideal in Hegel's thought, this school of philosophy was called German idealist philosophy.
Marx took from Hegel the focus on contradiction and conflict as the core of human development.
But instead of seeing development, or dialectics, as united in the ideal, Marx emphasized material experience. Marx's method therefore became known as "dialectical materialism" or "historical materialism."
Marx said that for Hegel, the dialectic was "standing on its head." Marx set about putting the dialectic on its feet. For Marx, the highest level of reality was not in the ideal, but lived experience.
What about English political economy?
Marx was impressed by authors such as the political economist Adam Smith who analyzed the market as industrial capitalism expanded. Adam Smith maintained that capitalism and market competition were the natural conditions of humanity.
Marx, however, disagreed with Smith's conclusion. Instead Marx applied his dialectical materialist method, borrowed from philosophy, to historical development of economic forms of conditions.
The crux of Marx's argument was that capitalism was only one of several phases of the social development of human production. Capitalism, according to Marx, was not natural or permanent.
Instead, it coincided with a specific stage of human social and political development. Capitalism could be understood only in terms, according to Marx, of "the birth, life and death of given social organism and its replacement by another, superior order."
He wanted to demonstrate that capitalism -- like feudalism, slavery, or ancient society -- was not only temporary, but also had internal contradictions.
At the core of all these societies was the contradiction based on class divisions. Capitalism according to Marx, was the most extreme society in terms of the depth of its contradiction.
On one side was a class of capitalists who owned and controlled the vast means of production that was the most productive ever in history. On the other side was the working class, or proletariat, that owned nothing but its ability to work for capital.
Marx saw capitalism as a progressive stage of human development because of its productive capacity. But nonetheless, he also saw it as the most brutal, "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."
socialism
Marx studied the democratic revolution against the monarchy in France in 1789. He understood that revolutionary transformation was a real, historical possibility, even if it took years to develop.
Then in 1871, when he was 53 years old, Marx was profoundly influenced by a mass uprising of the poor in France when they established the Paris Commune.
For two months workers in Paris took control of their workplaces, the streets and the neighbourhoods. They ran the city until a brutal counter-revolution by the ruling class crushed them.
Marx saw in the Paris Commune a glimpse of the future. He expected that as capitalism developed and became more widespread internationally, the working class would also grow.
Capitalists needed more and more workers to expand production, but workers were also a permanent potential threat to capitalism. Workers had the power to stop the profits of capital, and in so doing they developed the confidence to run society in the interests of human need.
Marx saw capitalism as developing its own "gravedigger."
Socialism for Marx was a society where the working class organized production for the satisfaction of human need.
But socialism was not inevitable in Marx's view. Capitalism would either lead to the "mutual destruction" of the major classes, or the mass of the working class would succeed in a revolutionary transformation that would, in Marx's words, end the "pre-history" of humanity.
Socialism was the first form of society where production would be for the purposes of satisfying human need, rather than the drive for profit.
So as we enter a new millennium, how then shall we remember Karl Marx? Engels put it best when he stated at Marx's funeral:
"Marx was above all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present day proletariat. Fighting was his element."