Classical Marxism
1845 – 1920
How people produce their living shapes what they think, and the conflicts inside that arrangement are what move history.
- Active
- 1845 – 1920
- Where
- London, Paris and the German exile press
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
The material conditions of production form the base on which law, politics and ideas rest. Class conflict arises from the relations of production, and the contradiction between forces and relations is what forces a system to change.
What it held
Marx begins as a Young Hegelian and leaves by turning the method on its own materials. Feuerbach had shown that God is the human essence projected; Marx asks what makes people need to project it, and answers that alienated labour does.
Alienation is the early theory and it is philosophical rather than economic. Under wage labour a worker is estranged from the product, from the activity, from other people and from what Marx calls species-being — the capacity for free conscious creation that makes human work different from a bee's.
The mature theory is in Capital and is more technical. Value comes from labour time; profit comes from the difference between what labour power costs and what it produces; and this is not theft but the normal operation of an exchange in which both parties get the market rate. That is the sharpest thing in the book — exploitation is structural rather than a matter of anyone cheating.
Commodity fetishism follows: relations between people take on the appearance of relations between things, so that a price seems to be a property of an object rather than a summary of an arrangement.
How it argued
Historical materialism — explaining ideas and institutions by the productive arrangements they arise in — combined with the immanent critique of political economy on its own terms.
What it was arguing against
Hegel's idealism, Feuerbach's ahistorical human essence, and the classical political economists whose categories Marx uses in order to break them.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the labour theory of value survives. How tightly the base determines the superstructure, which Engels spent his later letters softening. Whether the early alienation Marx and the late economic Marx are the same thinker.
Common misconceptions
That Marx wrote a blueprint for a socialist society. He wrote almost nothing about it and mocked those who did. And economic determinism in its crude form was disowned by Engels explicitly, who said he and Marx were partly to blame for the misreading.
How it began
A doctoral student blocked from academic work by his politics, who became a journalist, was expelled from three countries, and spent thirty years in the British Museum.
What became of it
Living, and split within a generation of his death into currents that regarded each other as heretical.
Lasting influence
Sociology, history and economics as disciplines. Twentieth-century politics on every continent. Also, less obviously, the ordinary assumption that ideas have social conditions.
Why it still matters
Inequality, precarious work and the analysis of ideology are all live subjects, and the vocabulary for discussing them is largely his.
Put another way
A machine whose owners cannot stop it speeding up, because a competitor's is speeding up too.
Where to start
The 1844 Manuscripts, then Capital chapter 1. The first is philosophy and the second is the machinery.
The surprising bit
He never used the phrase dialectical materialism. It was coined by Plekhanov after his death and became the name of an orthodoxy Marx did not formulate.
In their own words
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
Men make their own history, but not under circumstances they choose.
Connections
- Answers
- Young Hegelians, Hegelianism, French Materialism
- Opposed by
- Hegelianism
The verdict
The most consequential body of social theory ever written, and the one most damaged by the states that claimed it.