--Nasir Khan, May 5, 2018
“All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational
solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”
― Karl Marx
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the Prussian province of Rhine,
and died in London on March 14, 1883, at the age of 65. He was the most
influential socialist philosopher and revolutionary thinker, whose ideas
have deeply influenced the course of human history and human thought.
His writings cover philosophy, history, political economy,
anthropology, social criticism, history, theory of revolutionary
practice, and he himself participated in revolutionary activities. When
he was a student at the university, he was deeply involved in the Young
Hegelian movement. The members of this group in their articles and
pamphlets criticized Christian culture. Feuerbach’s materialism was
opposed to Hegel's idealism. He reduced Hegel's 'Absolute Spirit' to
human 'species being'.
Because of Marx's critical articles in the
Rheinische Zeitung, the government closed this paper. He went to Paris
in 1843 where he made contacts with French socialist groups and emigre
German workers. Here he met Frederick Engels and the two became friends
for the rest of their lives. But his stay there was short. He was
expelled from Paris in 1844.
After his expulsion from Paris,
Marx, along with Engels moved to Brussels, where they lived for three
years. After an intensive study of history, he formulated the theory of
history commonly known as historical materialism.
In his theory
of history, Marx accepted Hegel’s idea that the world develops according
to dialectical process. But the two had different ideas about what the
dialectic process entails. For Hegel, historical developments take place
through the mystical entity called Absolute Spirit. Marx rejected the
notion of Absolute Spirit, and said what moved society was not the
Absolute Spirit, but man’s relation to matter, of which the most
important part was played by the mode of production.
In this way,
Marx’s materialism becomes closely related to economics. Human labour
shaped society and material conditions determined the superstructures.
The part played by labour, not some mystical Absolute Spirit, formed the
basis of social life. Marx’s dialectal view of social change is shorn
of Hegel’s idealist dialectics. The two stand on different levels and
their philosophies of history differ.
For Marx, man working on
nature remakes the world and in doing so he also remakes himself by
increasing his powers. Marx wrote in the German Ideology, ‘Men have
history because they must produce their life.’
Marx went to Paris
in 1848 where the revolution first took place and then to Germany. But
the failure of the revolutions forced him to seek refuge in London in
1849, where he spent the rest of his life.
He and his family had
to face many economic hardships in London. His friend Engels helped him
economically and he himself wrote articles as a foreign correspondent
for the New York Daily Tribune for which he was paid reasonably well.
But he and his family showed no interest to spend the money frugally, as
a result they had unending economic problems.
However, the
revolutionary thinker devoted much time to the First International and
its annual Congresses. The rest of the time, he spent in the British
Museum library collecting material and taking notes and analyzing the
material for studies of political economy. In 1867, he published the
first volume of Capital, in which he discussed the capitalist mode of
production. He explained his views on the labour theory of value,
conception of surplus value, accumulation of capital and the ‘so called
primitive accumulation’ in the final part of the book. He had completed
the volumes II and II in the 1860s, which Engels published after the
death of Marx in 1883.
The profound analysis of capital, Marx
undertook in the nineteenth century is still relevant to our
understanding the global capitalism and the forces that control it. He
had shown the tendency of capital under the general law of capitalist
accumulation. A few own more wealth, but others have little to live on. A
recent Oxfam report says that eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6
billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity. In the global
economy, rich industrialists and producers take advantage of the global
workforce that mostly lives in the global South. The abundant cheap
labour from the poor countries is used to produce goods that are sold at
high prices in the industrialized western countries.
The problem
to end the exploitation of the working class people was a core issue
for Marx, and his theory to end this exploitation can only take place
when a more equitable form of society is created that stands opposed to
the accumulation of capital by a few and the poverty or meager existence
of the majority. That objective of a human society is not possible
under capitalism.
