de Chavez, Yvonne Dianne L.

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WHO IS KARL MARX?

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818 - 1883) was a German philosopher,
political theorist and revolutionary of the 19th Century.
Both a scholar and a political activist, Marx is often called
the father of Communism, and certainly his Marxist theory
provided the intellectual base for various subsequent forms
of Communism.

Marxism, the philosophical and

political school or tradition his work gave rise to, is a variety
of radical or revolutionary Socialism conceived as
a reaction against the
rampant Capitalism and Liberalism of 19th Century Europe,
with working class self-emancipation as its goal. Among
other things, he is known for his analysis of
history (particularly his concept of historical materialism)
and the search for a systemic understanding
of socioeconomic change.

Although a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on
workers' movements shortly after his death, especially with the Russian Revolution of 1917. Despite the
numerous debates among Marxists (and among political philosophers in general) over how
to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions, there are
few parts of the world which have not been significantly touched by Marx's ideas over the course of the
20th Century.

As a philosopher, Marx was influenced by a number of different thinkers, including

the Kantian and German Idealist Immanuel Kant; the Hegelianists Georg Hegel and Ludwig
Feuerbach (1804 - 1872); the British political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo (1772 - 1823);
and the French social theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Fourier (1772 - 1837), Henri de
Saint-Simon (1760 -1825), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 - 1865), Flora Tristan (1803 -1844) and Louis
Blanc (1811 - 1882).

Some have argued that Marx's original contributions to philosophy were extremely limited or even zero,
and that all he did was to adapt Hegel's work to his own political, social and economic ends. As a young
man at Humboldt and Jena Universities, Marx became involved with the atheistic Young Hegelians,
particularly Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 - 1872), Max Stirner (1806 - 1856) and Moses Hess (1812 - 1875),
who had begun to adapt Hegelianism and to criticize Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, but also to
make use of his dialectical method (separated from its theological content) as a powerful weapon for
the critique of established religion and politics.
de Chavez, Yvonne Dianne L.
11-Masipag

Stirner in particular inspired Marx's "epistemological break", and he developed the basic concept
of Historical Materialism in "Die Deutsche Ideologie" ("The German Ideology") as early as 1845, although
the manuscript was not actually published until long after his death. This was the work in which he first
noted that the nature of individuals depends on the material conditionsdetermining their production,
and in which he traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapseof the
present one (industrial ) and its replacement by Communism.

Essentially, Historical Materialism (or the Materialist Conception of History) is Marx's theory of history,
his attempt to make history scientific, and it undelies much of the rest of his work. It is based on the
principle of Dialectical Materialism (a synthesis of Hegel's theory of Dialectics and the idea that social
and other phenomena are essentially material in nature, rather than ideal or spiritual, hence the link
with Materialism) as it applies to history and societies. It holds that class struggle (the evolving conflict
between classes with opposing interests) is the means of bringing about changes in a society's mode of
production, and that it structures each historical period and drives historical change. Material conditions
and social relations are therefore historically malleable because developments and changes in human
societies are dependent on the way in which humans collectively produce the means to life.

"The German Ideology", as well as "The Poverty of Philosophy" of 1847 (a critique of

French socialist thought), laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, "The Communist
Manifesto", the defining document of Marxism and Communism. It was first published on 21 February
1848 as the manifesto of the Communist League, a small group of European communists who had come
to be influenced by Marx and Engels.

Source: http://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_marx.html