I. Introduction:

Karl Marx was born in 1818 and died in 1883. He was a German political, economic, philosophical theorist and revolutionist. The influence of Marx's materialistic conception of history has been vast. Until the collapse in 1991 of the Communist systems of the U.S.S.R. and Estern Europe, one-third of the world's population had been living under political administrations claiming descent from Marx's ideas. His impact on the world of thought has been equally extensive, embracing sociology, philosophy, economics and cultural theory. Indeed, the tradition of Marxist thought has provided the most powerful critique of capitalism which has ever been conducted.
 

Marx's thinking can be approached in terms of philosophical, economic and political strata. The major influences on him included Enlightenment rationalism, various forms of socialism and in particular, the economic and philosophical thought of the German philosopher Hegel, whose dialectic shaped the form of Marx's earlier, and arguably his later, thought.
 

II. Fundamental principles of Marx's thought:

(1) Critique of Bourgeois Society:

Before we talk about Marx's ideas, we need to ask: why did he undertake a critique of bourgeois society? What exactly did he think was wrong with it? We've already seen that Charles Dickens represented a small part of a broad reaction against bourgeois ideals and practices. Marx attempts systematically to seek the structural causes behind this system of exploitation and degradation and to offer solutions in the spheres of economics and politics. As with all socialists, Marx's main objection to capitalism was that one particular class owned the means of economic production: "The bourgeoisie...has centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands" (p. 3, LH, pr 4). The correlative of this is the oppression and exploitation of the working classes: "In proportion as the bourgeosie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed; a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecmeal, are a commodity..." (p. 4, LH, pr 3). Marx's third objection is the imperialistic nature of the bourgeois enterprise: in order to perpetuate itself, capitalism must spread its tentacles all over the world: (p. 2, RH, pr 3) "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production...The need of a constantly expanding market...chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe." Marx tells us in the next few paragraphs that the bourgeoisie must necessarily give a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country; that raw material is drawn from the remotest zones; that demand for new products ever increases; that the bourgoisie "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production..." In short, the bourgeoisie "creates a world after its own image." Finally, (p. 2, LH, last pr) capitalism reduces all human relationships to a "cash" nexus, self-interest and egotistical calculation.
 
 
 

(2) Adaptation of Hegelian Dialectic:

What is the dialectic? Very simply, it's a way of thinking about any object or circumstance in a series of increasingly complex and comprehensive stages. Each stage supersedes the previous stage but retains what was essential in that previous stage. The third or final stage provides the principle of unity for the entire process. For example, "plant" could be viewed as the unifying principle of its own earlier stages, bud, blossom and fruit. Hegel also sees the dialectic as moving through history. For example, previous philosophers had offered one-sided accounts of the world, according to their particular biases. Descartes emphasises reason; Locke and Hume emphasised experience; Hobbes emphasises matter. Hegel saw all of these various systems in historical perspective, as one continuous system of philosophy which was always progressing through new visions while retaining what was important in previous ways of understanding the world. Hegel sees this dialectic as operating not only through the history of thought but also through the history of the world: the underlying principles of one one society eventually give way to a new society based on different principles but which incorporate whatever was valuable in the previous principles. Perhaps the most important feature of dialectical thought is its insistence that whatever we examine, we place in a historical context, viewing it as a product of certain historical relations and tendencies.
 

(3) The Materialistic Conception of History:

(a) The Dialectical Movement of History:

In The German Ideology (1846), Marx develops his critique of Hegel's dialectic into what he calls the materialistic conception of history. Hegel's dialectic furnished Marx with a model of history which he of course adapted. Like Hegel, he viewed the world, human beings and history as a product of human labour. But whereas Hegel saw the dialectical movement of history as driven by an Absolute Spirit or God, Marx insisted that the dialectic of history was motivated by material forces, by upheavals in the forces and relations of economic production. In particular, he viewed history as driven by class struggle: (p. 1, LH, bottom): "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." We can see in the passages on p. 1 that Marx alludes to the history of class conflict from the ancient world to his own times: between slaves and freemen, patricians and plebeians, lords and serfs. The major class conflict in modern times is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or industrial working class. And, just as the capitalist mode of production superseded the feudal mode, so the capitalist mode will give way to socialism. It is the bourgeoisie itself which creates the instrument of its own destruction: the proletariat, on the one hand, who will unite against it; and increasingly destructive economic crises which are internal to the operations of capitalism. See passages p. 3, RH, bottom; p. 4, LH pr 2; and p. 6, LH, pr 2.
 

Finally, Marx opposed previous philosophical systems inasmuch as they were idealistic; he insisted that the dialectic in history involved a necessary combination of theory and practice, that a given economic and political system cannot be abolished by mere thought but by a revolution. His most famous statement in this respect was: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." (Marx, Engels, 1973, 95). In The German Ideology Marx suggests that the phase of bourgeois domination can be abolished by revolution given two practical premises: it must have rendered most men propertyless and also have produced, in contrast, an existing world of wealth and culture (Marx, Engels, 1982, 56). But he also emphasises the universality or world-historical nature of this conflict: such revolution presupposes not only highly developed productive capacities but that individuals have become enslaved under a power alien to them: the world market. Marx accepted that the struggle between classes might begin in specific nations but must inevitably be conducted as an international struggle given that the bourgeois mode of production dictated constant international expansion of markets (Marx, Engels, 1973, 47).
 

(b) Economic Base and Superstructure:

The main premise of the materialist conception of history is that man's first historical act is the production of means to satisfy his material needs. The production of life, through both labour and procreation, is both natural and social: a given mode of production is combined with a given stage of social co-operation. Only after passing through these historical moments, says Marx, can we speak of men possessing "consciousness", which is itself a "social product". Hence the realms of ideology, politics, law, morality, religion and art are not independent but are an efflux of a people's material behaviour: "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" (Marx, Engels, 1982, 47-51).
 

(4) The Division of Labour:

This model of superstructure and economic base furnishes the form of Marx's analyses of State, class and ideology in terms of the history of the division of labour. Marx traces various stages of this history, affirming that they are effectively different forms of ownership. In general terms, Marx argues that division of labour is an index of the extent to which production has been developed. It leads to separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, hence a conflict of interests between town and country. It then effects a separation of individual and community interests (Marx, Engels, 1982, 43-46). Moreover, the division of labour which first manifested itself in the sexual act appears eventually in its true shape as a division of material and mental labour; this is the point at which "pure" theory becomes possible.
 

Marx cites three crucial consequences of the social division of labour: firstly, the unequal distribution of labour and its products, and hence private property. The second consequence is the State. The division of labour implying a contradiction between individual or family and communal interest, the latter assumes an independent form as the State, as an "illusory communal life" divorced from the real interests of both individual and community. It is based especially on classes, one of which dominates the others. It follows, says Marx, that all struggles within the State are disguised versions of the struggle between classes.
 

The third consequence of division of labour is what Marx calls "estrangement" or "alienation" of social activity. Not only does division of labour force upon each person a particular sphere of activity whereby his "own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him", but the social power or "multiplied productive force" as determined by the division of labour appears to individuals, because their mutual co-operation is forced, as "an alien force existing outside them" which develops independently of their will. "How otherwise," asks Marx, "does it happen that trade...rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand..?" (Marx, Engels, 1982, 54-55)
 

(5) Marx's Conception of Ideology:

Marz states (p. 8, LH, bottom) that the class which is the ruling material force in society is also the ruling intellectual force. Having at its disposal the means of production, it is empowered to disseminate its ideas in the realms of law, morality, religion and art, as possessing universal verity. Thus, dominant ideas of the aristocracy such as honour and loyalty were replaced after bourgeois ascendancy by ideas of freedom and equality, whose infrastructure is class economic imperatives (Marx, Engels, 1982, 64-65). Marx's notion of ideology is this: the ruling class represents its own interests as the interests of the people as a whole. The modern State, as Marx says on p. 2, LH, pr 3, "is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (Marx, Engels, 1973, 45-47).
 

(6) The Theory of Surplus Value:

Marx's economic views, worked out largely in the Grundisse, a huge manuscript unpublished in his lifetime, and expressed in Volume I of Capital (1867), derive in one sense from his inversion of Hegel's dialectic, expressed by Marx in his famous statement that with Hegel the dialectic "is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell" (Marx, 1977, 29). Implied in this inversion is the insistence that labour was the foundation of economic life. The bourgeois economists Smith and Ricardo had expressed the labour theory of value, whereby an object's value was measured by the amount of labour it incarnated. Developing their distinction between use-value and exchange-value, Marx arrived at his notion of surplus value, whereby labour power as embodied in production is incompletely compensated: the worker might be paid for value of the products generated by only four hours' work, whereas he was actually working for eight hours.
 

Marx saw this form of economic exploitation as underlying the ultimate downfall of capitalism: the first volume of Capital describes the "greed" on the part of the capitalists for surplus labour, their attempts to intsensify labour and profit through both technology and control of resources through imperial expansion, as well as increasingly to centralise capital in the hands of fewer and fewer owners. In an apocalyptic passage, he states: "along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital...grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself...The knell of capitalist prvate property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." Significantly, Marx sees this as part of a dialectical process: "capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation" (Marx, 1977, 715). Hence the capitalist world represents the second phase of the dialectic, negating feudalism. Communism is the "negation of the negation" whereby the contradiction between private property and socialised production is resolved by the establishment of socialised property. Equally, the contradictions within the self, hitherto alienated from its own labour, as well as those between individual and communal interests, are abolished.
 
 
 

III. Friedrich Engels:

The importance of Friedrich Engels, who lived from 1820-1895, lies in his collaboration with Marx to produce a critique of capitalist society based on a materialistic conception of history, his attempt to formulate a "scientific" basis for socialism, his explorations of the connections between dialectics and natural science, his analyses of working class conditions as well as of the development of the family and State. It was largely Engels who was responsible for the initial dissemination, clarification and popularisation of Marxist ideas.
 

In 1842 he settled in Manchester, England, where he started work at a factory in which his father was a shareholder. He saw at first hand the miserable conditions suffered by British workers, his research into these conditions being published as The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1845. Here, Engels argued that the degraded conditions of the English proletariat, generated by its industrial exploitation, would eventually mould it into a revolutionary political force. Let us briefly review the specific arguments advanced in the assigned reading: (1) Industry, commerce and the concentration of property reaches its highest point in the big towns, and it is here that the effects of industrialization can be most clearly seen; (2) these towns are marked by an extreme polarisation of rich and poor, the vast majority, of course, being poor; (3) London, the commercial capital of the world, is an emblem of the wonders of modern civilisation; however, hidden behind this splendid facade is the endless suffering and labour of the mass of people which enables a tiny minority to live life to their fullest creative and cultural potential; (4) the general characteristics of town life are: anonymity and indifference; narrow minded egotism; the disintegration of society into atomistic, competing individuals; (5) in these conditions, the signs of class warfare, between a tiny group of monopolising capitalists and a vast majority of workers in abject poverty, is everywhere evident; (6) this class conflict is visible expecially in the layout of the towns: the quarters of the poor are separated from the rich, marked by filth, poverty, lack of water and adequate sewage, and appalling town-planning; the districts of the rich are marked by spaciousness, well-maintained facilities and convenient transport; (7) the town of Manchester is cited as the masterpiece of the Industrial Revolution, embodying its essence: steam power, machinery and the division of labour.
 

IV. Summary and Conclusion:

The materialistic conception of history is characterised by a number of features: (a) it is the activity and conditions of material production, not mere ideas, which determine the structure of society and the nature of individuals; law, art, religion and morality are an efflux of these material relations; (b) the evolution of division of labour issues in the concentration of private property, a conflict between individual and communal interests (the latter assuming the status of an independent power as the State), and estrangement or alienation of social activity; (c) all struggles within the State are euphemisms for the real struggle between classes; it is this struggle which generates social change; (d) once technologically assisted capitalist accumulation, concentration, and world expansion has led to a world of sharply contrasting wealth and poverty, and working classes become conscious of their historical role, capitalism itself will yield to a communism which will do away with private property and base itself on human need rather than the greed of a minority for increasing profit.
 

The Communist Manifesto, in summary, described the victorious revolution of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, the principles of capitalist society, centred on private property, the need for expansion of markets, and the reduction of all human relations, including family and gender relations, to commercial relations. It expressed also the aims of the communists: to abolish not only private property but the other foundational institutions of capitalism such as nation, State and class itself.
 

Is Marxism dead? Can we, finally, consign it to historical and political obsolescence? (1) We need to recognise that most of what has passed for "communism" had but remote connections with the doctrines of Marx or his followers. (2) Marx's critique of capitalism, it should be recalled, was dialectical. He regarded capitalist society as an unprecedented historical advance from centuries of benighted and superstitious feudalism. The bourgeois emphasis on reason, practicality, its technological enterprise in mastering the world, its ideals of rational law and justice, individual freedom and democracy were all hailed by Marx as historical progress. His point was not that communism would somehow displace capitalism in its entirety but that it would grow out of capitalism and retain its ideals of freedom and democracy. The essential difference is that a communist society would realise these ideals. For example, Marx shrewdly points out that the "individual" in capitalist society is effectively the bourgeois owner of property; individual freedom is merely economic freedom, the freedom to buy and sell. The constitution and the laws are entirely weighted in favour of large business interests and owners of property. The aim of a communist society is to procure genuine freedom, genuine individuality and humanity, genuine democracy.

(3) Marxism serves as a perpetual reminder that poverty, illiteracy, crime, political oppression are neither to be accepted as inevitable nor to be remedied by individual or group acts of good will. They are structural phenomena with roots in a given economic system and must be addressed as such. Given the political climate of the world today, it may be that the arguments of Marx and Engels must enter into sustained dialogue with both the apologists of this economic system and those advancing humanitarian causes within it. But as long as human poverty, immiseration and oppression exist, whether under the banner of liberalism, comunism or religious fundamentalism, the arguments of Marx and Engels will retain their force and relevance in human affairs.