19th Century
Karl Marx
1818–1883
“Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all.”
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, journalist, and political economist who spent much of his adult life in exile in London. With Engels he wrote . In he analyzes industrial capitalism as a system in which labor-power is bought as a commodity and surplus value is extracted as profit. Wage labor, on this view, shares a structure of exploitation with earlier forms of forced labor. Emancipation requires abolishing that relation. Reform of wages alone will not end it. Later theories of justice, history, and the state still have to face this challenge to private ownership of the means of production.
In the Conversation
14 of the Great Ideas
Politics
Liberty
Political liberty without economic liberation is formal and hollow. True freedom requires ending class.
Government
The state is an instrument of class rule. It will wither away when classes are abolished.
Law
Law is not the realization of reason but the instrument of class rule masked as universality.
Democracy
Liberal democracy is bourgeois class rule; true democracy requires abolishing the economic conditions that produce inequality.
Wealth
Capital is not a thing but a social relation; wealth accumulates through the exploitation of labor, and its history is written in blood.
Revolution
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles; proletarian revolution is the final and most radical rupture.
Labor
Labor creates all value, but capitalism alienates workers from their product, their activity, and each other; emancipation requires abolishing wage labor altogether.
Oligarchy
The modern state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie; political oligarchy is inseparable from capitalist economic relations.
Metaphysics
Logic & Method
Aesthetics & History
History
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles; material conditions drive ideological change.
Progress
History is driven by the contradictions of the mode of production; capitalism generates its own grave-diggers, and communism represents the first genuinely human stage of history.