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Book No. – 4 (Political Science)
Book Name – Western Political Thought (Shefali Jha)
What’s Inside the Chapter? (After Subscription)
1. MARX ON THE HUMAN SPECIES
2. MARX’S THEORY OF ALIENATION
3. FROM ALIENATED LABOUR TO COMMODITY FETISHISM
4. MARX’S THEORY OF EXPLOITATION
5. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
6. MARX’S THEORY OF CLASS STRUGGLE
7. MARX’S THEORY OF THE STATE AND REVOLUTION
8. MARX IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
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LANGUAGE
Karl Marx (1818–1883): The State and Class Struggle
Chapter – 12
Table of Contents
- Karl Marx‘s critique of capitalism emphasizes that it is a system lacking freedom.
- He takes the Hegelian idea seriously, believing that individual freedom is the result of specific social conditions.
- Marx concluded that capitalism, as a class society, is antithetical to freedom and leads to the subordination of the proletariat.
- In Marx’s view, capitalism is a society of systemic unfreedom for all its members.
- Born in 1818 in Trier, western Prussia, into a middle-class Jewish family.
- Marx’s father, a lawyer, converted to Protestantism to escape discrimination.
- Marx studied law at the University of Bonn but shifted to Hegelian philosophy at the University of Berlin.
- After completing his doctorate, Marx struggled to find work in academia and began writing for the Rheinische Zeitungin 1842.
- Marx criticized the Prussian government’s policy towards poverty-stricken Moselle winegrowers, leading to the paper’s closure.
- He moved to Paris in 1843, where he met Moses Hess, who introduced him to socialist circles.
- In Paris, he wrote the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1844.
- In 1845, the Prussian government forced Marx out of Paris, and he moved to Brussels with Engels.
- In 1847, Marx helped establish the Communist League in London and wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in February 1848.
- Within a month, the Belgian government expelled Marx, so he returned to Cologne and founded a radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
- In 1849, Marx fled to England, where he lived until his death in 1883.
- In London, Marx spent years researching for Capital at the British Museum.
- Capital was finally published in 1867.
- Other well-known works of Marx include The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The Civil War in France, and the three volumes of Capital.
MARX ON THE HUMAN SPECIES
- Lenin described Marx’s theory as a mixture of German philosophy, British political economy, and French socialism.
- As a university student in Germany, Marx was part of the young Hegelians, who sought to push Hegel’s philosophyto its radical limits.
- Marx accepted Hegel’s emphasis on the active nature of human beings but rejected his idealism.
- For Marx, human consciousness is always embodied, meaning humans must be alive to think and feel.
- Human beings are natural beings, dependent on nature to survive.
- Unlike animals, humans are universal creatures, using all of nature for survival rather than being limited to instincts.
- Human consciousness for Marx extends beyond instincts and is an active force in the world.
- Sensuous human activity is the embodied nature of human existence, not just thought alone.
- Humans live from nature, and to survive, they engage in sensuous human activity.
- Marx contrasts humans and animals, stating that while animals are immediately one with their life activity, humans make their life activity an object of their will and consciousness.
- Humans use all of nature as both means of life, and the matter, object, and tool of their life activity.
- Through their activity, humans create a new world, materially and intellectually.
- Human species-being involves producing a new world both in consciousness and through material activity.
- Marx’s materialism contrasts with contemplative materialism, which views reality as only an object or contemplation, not as sensuous human activity.
- For Marx, material being creates the possibility of consciousness in humans.
- Humans mediate their interaction with nature through interaction with each other, leading to the creation of a new world.
- This new world becomes the object-world of their thought and practice.
- When humans find this object strange or difficult to understand and manipulate, they experience alienation.