The thought of Karl Marx

In this lesson from a TEACHER we teach you the Karl Marx thought, philosopher, economist, sociologist, communist and of Jewish origin. He is, along with Friedrich Engels, the father of historical materialism and the best known works of him are The capital and The Communist Party Manifesto. He lays the foundations of modern sociology, alongside Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, and in the words of Paul Ricoeur, he forms, together with Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, the trio known as "the masters of the suspicion".

His theory is known by the name of Marxism, a movement that maintains that the engine of history is the class struggle. His starting point is the Hegelian dialectic, but from a historical and pragmatic approach. If you want to know more about the thought of Karl Marx, he continues reading a PROFESSOR.

In order to Karl Marx, "the only real thing is nature"and he is inspired by the Hegelian dialectic understood as the overcoming of contradictions through synthesis, but instead of understanding that the essential is the spirit, like Hegel, he thinks that the fundamental is the matter. He is also influenced by the Atomists, Mechanism and Ludwig Feuerbach.

According to the philosopher "the ideal is nothing more than the material transposed and translated in the head of man", thus defending a dialectical materialism, as opposed to the idealism of Hegel, who affirmed that nature is the alienation of the "absolute idea" that his being projected in the spirit.

Feuerbach, criticizes the Hegelian dialectic and says that God is the alienation of the human being before an idea alien to himself. From here, Karl Marx develops his alienation theory.

Unlike previous materialists, Marx does not only attend to the human being as an abstract entity, but Marx's materialism implies the "Revolutionary practical activity". What it is about, for this thinker, is explain the theory from from praxis. Its aim is to transform society and not simply theorize about it.

On Thesis on Feuerbach he writes:

"Philosophers have done nothing more than interpret the world in different ways, but the point is to transform it."

And in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, say what

“The weapon of criticism obviously cannot bear the criticism of weapons; material force must be overcome by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it dominates the masses... "

We continue to know the thought of Karl Marx to speak now of the concept of alignment. Marx and Engels, they think that the essential thing in the human being is work. People are capable of transforming nature at will, of dominating it. Transforming nature the individual transforms himself, while he identifies with her and also with his work and with the product of his work.

But in a capitalist system, work is something alien to the worker, he does not feel identified with himself, nor with what he produces, nor as an individual. On the other hand, under the law of supply and demand, nature becomes an object more susceptible to buy and sell. The human being, thus, lives alienated, alienated, out of himself: with respect to himself, to his work, to the product of his work and also to with respect to nature, which becomes the place where people live, to become a product more.

“Political Economy hides the essential alienation of work because it does not consider the immediate relationship between the worker (work) and production. [...] What is, then, the alienation of labor? Firstly, work is external to the worker, that is, it does not belong to his being; in that in his work, the worker does not affirm himself, but denies himself; he does not feel happy, but unhappy; he does not develop a free physical and spiritual energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his spirit. That is why the worker only feels himself outside of work, and outside of himself at work.

He is in his business when he does not work and when he works he is not in his business. His work is thus not voluntary, but forced, forced labor. So it is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means of meeting the needs outside of work. [...] Ultimately, for the worker the exteriority of the work is shown in that it is not his own, but someone else's, which does not belong to him; in that when it is in it, it does not belong to itself, but to another ”.

The criticism of capitalism It is another of the bases of the thought of Karl Marx. And it is that Marx and Engels denounce that the "modes of production", a term coined by both, in the capitalist system depends on two things: "the productive forces" and the "relations of production".

Private ownership of the means of production is its main characteristic and what it will undoubtedly bring to an end. This is because the contradiction between wage labor and capitalist laborIt can only lead to a revolution.

Another Marxist concept is that of capital gain, which would be that part of the worker's unpaid work. A worker works for the capitalist, who only gives him a small part of the benefits obtained from his work and keeps the rest. With this, the worker can buy the same that he has manufactured and that the machine of capitalism continues in motion.

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We end this summary of Karl Marx's thought by talking about Marx's historical materialism which is clearly marked by the dialectic of Hegel's history, although from materialism and not from idealism. The relations of production are the engine of history and not the spirit.

"My research led me to the conclusion that both legal relations and forms of state cannot be understood by themselves nor by the so-called general evolution of the human spirit, but, on the contrary, lie in the material conditions of lifetime".

In the Communist Party Manifesto affirms that the history of humanity is nothing more than the history of the class struggle, a struggle between the exploiter and the exploited.

“The history of every society to this day has been nothing but the history of class struggles. Free men and slaves, patricians and commoners, nobles and serfs, master craftsmen and day laborers, in a word, oppressors and oppressed, in constant struggle, maintained an uninterrupted war, already open, already disguised; a war that always ended, either because of a revolutionary transformation of society, or because of the destruction of the two antagonistic classes.

For Marx and Engels communism was not an ideal, but understood it as the annihilation and overcoming of capitalism.