Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a German political, economic, philosophical theorist and revolutionist. The year 1991 saw the collapse of the Communist systems of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, an event embodied for the popular imagination in the opening of the Berlin Wall between East and West Germany. Given that a third of the world's population had been living under political administrations claiming descent from Marx's thought, this phenomenon might aptly be seen as one of the major upheavals of the modern world.
 

Marx's thinking can be approached in terms of philosophical, economic and political strata. As a philosopher, Marx's development has its roots in his early life. Born into a Jewish family where his father had imbibed Enlightenment rationalist principles, Marx was exposed to the ideas of Voltaire, Lessing and Racine. He studied Law at the university of Bonn and then Berlin. But much of his time was spent in literary composition and for a while he was enamoured of the Romanticism then in vogue. While these influences were never fully to recede, they were superseded by Marx's seminal encounter was with the work of G.W.F. HEGEL, whose dialectic shaped the form of Marx's earlier, and arguably his later, thought. The dialectic did not comprise the commonly cited triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis: Hegel cited this formula only twice in his entire work and Marx never used it. In Hegel's hands, the dialectic had both logical and historical dimensions. Logically, it was a unifying method of thought designed to overcome the gulf between the human self and the world, between subject and object, created cumulatively not only by the history of philosophy up to that point but by the hitherto developed social configurations of which philosophy was the rational expression. The three stage dialectic formalised into a principle the imperative that thought was a process rather than a mechanical tool as it had been in the hands of previous one-sided attempts to understand the world, such as materialism or empiricism. In the first stage an object was apprehended in its sensuous immediacy; the second stage adopted a broadened perspective which saw the object as "externalised", as having no independent identity but constituted by its manifold relations with its context. The third stage, from a still wider standpoint, viewed the object as a "mediated" unity, its true identity now perceived as a principle of unity between universal and particular, between essence and appearance. In this way, "plant" could be viewed as the unifying principle of its own developing stages, bud, blossom and fruit. Hegel's historical treatment of the dialectic is extremely complex but he basically sees societies, from the Oriental world through the Greek and Roman to the modern German world, developing through successive stages of the dialectic: this comprises an historical increase in degree of self-consciousness culminating in the realisation that the external world is a construction out of human subjectivity. On a political plane, society's laws become more and more rational while the individual's correlative rational growth enables him to see in the law an expression of his own free will. Hegel thus calls history a movement towards freedom, which is also a movement of Absolute Spirit from its initial imprisonment in pure immediacy to its self-realisation as universal.
 

The importance of the dialectic for Marx stems from his awareness that the "freedom" Hegel speaks of is the freedom of the bourgeois class to bring down the economic and political edifice of feudalism whose social hierarchy rested on irrational theology and superstition: society could now be organised on rational principles, a freer market economy, and a human subject who saw his individual interests enshrined in the general law. Hence the dialectic provided a powerful political tool, one which could negate a given state of affairs. It also furnished Marx with a model of history as not only driven by political and ideological conflict but where earlier phases were "sublated", both preserved and transcended, in their negation by subsequent phases. For a while Marx associated with the "Young Hegelians" who attempted to exploit the negative power of the dialectic in political analysis. But Marx's reading of French socialists such as Proudhon, his concern with immediate political issues, his exposure to Feuerbach's materialism and his encounter with FREDERICK ENGELS' analyses of capitalism impelled him to insist that the dialectic of history was motivated by material forces. Hegel had correlated the historical period of the French Revolution, the period marking a bourgeois rise towards hegemony, with the second phase of the dialectic, the phase of externalisation or estrangement. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx's essential argument against Hegel is that this estrangement or alienation in bourgeois society cannot be overcome by mere thought: existence and essence can only be harmonised "in a practical way, by means of a revolution." While Marx praises Hegel's dialectic inasmuch as it grasps the importance of labour, through which man creates himself, he views it as abstract because it is a "divine process", first negating religion and then restoring it. In other words, after recognising religion as a product of self-alienation, Hegel holds that self-consciousness finds its absolute confirmation in religion as rationalised through philosophy. Marx effectively equates the retention of religion by Hegel's dialectic with its retention of the ideal of private property. Thus, while the second stage of the dialectic reveals the self-estrangement of bourgeois society, manifested in the spheres of religious and economic ideals, the third stage confirms that society as the rational order of things. Hence Marx cites Hegel's standpoint as "that of modern political economy", by which he means the bourgeois economists Smith, Say and Ricardo. So Marx, following Feuerbach, opposes the third stage of the dialectic, the negation of the negation, which restores and justifies the state of alienation. In religious and economic spheres Marx advocates two kinds of humanism: "atheism, being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretical humanism, and communism, as the supersession of private property, is...the advent of practical humanism. Hence for Marx the third stage of the dialectic is practical, not something which can be resolved in theory (Marx, 1981, 127-143). Marx's striking equation of religion and private property as expressions of alienation had been hinted at in an earlier article on Hegel. Here, Marx regarded religion as having an ideologically apologetic and politically refractive function, whereby it annulled the political exigencies of the here and now by seeing them as part of a larger, justifying and consolatry, providential pattern: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world...It is the opium of the people" (Marx, Engels, 1975, 39).
 

This central insistence on the unity of theory and practice lies at the core of Marx's politics and is summarised in his renowned expression in "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845): "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." (Marx, Engels, 1973, 95).

While Marx's political views are scattered throughout his writings, often occasioned by immediate political events, their pivotal notions of Civil Society, State and class are succintly enshrined in The German Ideology (1846) and the Communist Manifesto (1848). In the former work, Marx further develops his critique of Hegel's dialectic into what he calls the materialistic conception of history, which is the broad foundation on which he analyses these political notions. The initial premise of this conception is that man's first historical act is the production of means to satisfy his material needs; the fulfilment of these leads to the production of new needs. The family, at first the only social relation, is eventually unable to accommodate these increased needs, which arise from increased population. The production of life, through both labour and procreation, is thus 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).
 

This model of superstructure and economic base furnishes the form of Marx's analyses of State, class and ideology. The foundational content of these analyses is the history of the division of labour. Marx traces various stages of this history, affirming that they are effectively different forms of ownership. At first, the division of labour takes an elementary form in tribal ownership, where the social structure is limited to an extended family. Ancient communal and state ownership sees the union of tribes into a city; as immovable private property evolves and its concentration begins in early Rome, division of labour becomes more developed, generating conflict of interests between town and country. Moreover, class relations between citizens and slaves are now completely developed. In Feudalism, the directly producing class is not the slaves but the enserfed peasantry. The urban counterpart of feudal landownership is corporative property and orgainisation of trades. The need for bourgeois association against the nobility and for communal markets led to the formation of Guilds while the accumulated capital and stable numbers of craftsmen generated the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which yielded an urban hierarchy similar to that in the country. 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, a point which Marx acknoweledges, however, with some qualification.
 

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 latent slavery in the family, says Marx, is the first property. He goes so far as to equate division of labour and private property, under the relation of product and activity. 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. As he will later declaim in The Communist Manifesto (1848): "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Marx and Engels, 1952, 40). The class which is struggling for mastery must gain political power in order to represent its interest as the general interest (Marx, Engels, 1982, 52-53). Here, then, is the germ of Marx's concept of ideology: 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). As Marx states in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie "creates a world after its own image." The modern State, then, "is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (Marx, Engels, 1973, 45-47). This conception of the State in part embodies Marx's rejection of Hegel's view of the connection between civil society and the State. Hegel had characterised civil society as the sphere of personal and economic relations between men, as opposed to the political institutions which formalise these relations. Civil society is effectively a stage of mutual competition between private interests. Hegel had argued that such conflicting interests would be be transcended and harmonised by the State, the rationality of whose laws and institutions would be perceived by the increasingly rational consciousness of citizens. Marx disagrees: in his articles "On the Jewish Question" and "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," he employs Feuerbach's characterisation of man as a "species-being" while stressing nevertheless the social basis of humanity to argue that mere political emancipation, represented by publicly institutionalising individuals' private interests in the State, "leaves intact the world of private interest" and must give way to human emancipation, which is not directed by class but universal interests. The proletariat can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity: "This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat." Hence, for Marx, civil society is the basis of the State, not vice versa; the latter, representing merely particular class interests, cannot overcome the conflictul nature of the former without abolishing itself (Marx, 1964, 58, 16).
 

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)
 

This question, far from rhetorical, yields a broad avenue into Marx's economics, which can receive only cursory treatment here. As with his philosophy and politics, 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 insisted that a commodity needed to be of use in order to command the power of exchange with other commodities or money but that this power was not a reflection of use-value but rather of market conditions (Marx, 1977, 43-48). The contradiction between these two types of value emerges in the commodification of labour power itself, which generates the class conflict between labour and capital. Also instrumental in this conflict is what Marx called 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: his various chapters in the first volume of Capital describe 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 monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist prvate property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." Significantly, Marx sees this as part of a dialectical process moving from feudalism through capitalism to communism, whose essential feature is common ownership of land and the means of production: "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.
 

In his "Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," Marx had expressed this economic dialectic by saying that it was when "the material productive forces of society" came into conflict with "the existing relations of production" that historical upheavals resulted (Marx, 1976, 3). In The German Ideology Marx suggests that the estrangement which governs the second phase of the dialectic, 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 expansion of markets and the coercion of all nations, "on pain of extinction", into the bourgeois economic mould (Marx, Engels, 1973, 47).
 

Marx's views on literature and art are somewhat piecemeal and do not form a coherent theory. It is has been one of the tasks of Marxist critics to assemble coherent theories, often emphasising certain of his scattered insights at the expense of others. But a nucleus of elements can be distinguished as the common starting point of most Marxist theory: firstly, that art is a commodity and like other commodities can be understood only in the fullness of its connections with ideology, historical class conflict and material substructure. Secondly, art is one aspect of man's self-creation through labour. It is part of the process whereby an "objective" world is created out of a collective human subjectivity. Thirdly, language is not a self-enclosed system of relations but must be understood as social practice, as deeply rooted in material conditions as any other practice (Marx, Engels, 1982, 51). Having said this, both Marx and Engels appear to have granted a relative autonomy to art, acknowledging that there was not a relation of simple reflection between art and its material substructure (Marx, 1977, 359).
 

As with Marx's work in general, his inconclusiveness on literary matters has generated a rich variety of theories, the differences between which lie not merely in their use of Marx's literary comments but in their visions of Marx's thought as a whole. Even to summarise the vast tradition of Marxist theory would require a separate article; but it should be stressed here that the connection between Marx's canon and Marxism has always been dialectical: the latter has always striven to modify, extend and adapt the former to changing circusmtances rather than treating it as definitive and complete. Lenin, for example, was obliged to extend Marx's political insights according to the rapidly changing exigencies of a mass revolution. When Lukacs used Engels' notion of artistic typicality to advocate a realism distinct from bourgeois realism, his project was inspired partly by a reaction against the ideologies implied in Western modernism. At a later stage, Althusser felt obliged to emphasise Marx's scientificity and his departure from, rather than his debt to, Hegel. Jameson has performed the task of extending Marx's insights into analyses of postmodernism and late capitalism. Eagleton has persistently rearticulated the terms of communication, as well as the differences, between Marxism and much of modern literary theory.
 

Despite this dialectical connection between Marx and his theoretical descendants, some commentators have treated Marx's canon as a static and finished construct, pointing for example to the inaccuracy of some of Marx's predictions: for example, Marx anticipated that society would divide into two broad classes whereas in actuality increasing stratification of society seems to have occurred. Such a procedure can command some respect provided that it is grounded, as it sometimes has been, in a knowledge of Marx's work. The danger, already pervasive, is that this approach can degenerate into an uninformed cynicism which dismisses the relevance of Marx's work and consigns it to historical and political obsolescence. After all, have not socialism and communism failed? Has Marxism not proved its inability to be realised in practice? Have not the remaining socialist states in the world been forced to initiate capitalist enterprise so as to jolt into life their barren economies? Have not economic and personal freedom, not to mention democracy, won the day? It is surely time for Marxism to acknowledge that it speaks from beyond the grave.
 

Perhaps the greatest irony in all this triumphalism is that the collapse of communism can best be explained in precisely Marxist terms: this entails partly the simple recognition that most of what has passed for "communism" had but remote connections with the doctrines of Marx or his followers. 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. Private property, Marx points out, is already abolished for the nine tenths of the population in capitalist society who do not possess it. The labour of this vast majority, being commodified, is as subject to the vicissitudes of the market as any other commodity. One of the main sins of capitalism, according to Marx, was that it reduced all human relations to commercial relations. Even the family cannot escape such commidification: Marx states that, to the bourgeois man, the wife is reduced to a mere instrument of production. Moreover, once the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer has finished, then he is set upon, says Marx, by the other segments of the bourgeoisie: the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker. In bourgeois society "capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality" (Marx, Engels, 1973, 51, 53, 65-70). The aim of a communist society is to procure genuine freedom, genuine individuality and humanity, genuine democracy. As an internal critique of the tendencies of capitalism and its crises, Marxism is uniquely coherent and incisive. Without the influence of Marxism as a body of thought, the claims of the law to be eternal, of the bourgeoisie to represent the interests of the entire nation, of individuality and freedom to be universal, would go effectively unchallenged. The idea of the present as an historical phase, with roots in the past and branches in the future, would be confined to books rather being a matter of long-term political practice. Moreover, the vocabulary and concepts of Marxism have exercised a decisive and formative influence on other modern theories, both radical and reactionary: feminism, deconstruction, structuralism, existentialism and new historicism all owe some debt to Marxist thought and have striven to develop a dialogue with it.
 

Even after the collapse of the so-called communist bloc, many of Marx's ideas can still be seen as operative: that capitalism would be driven to engulf the entire world, penalising nations which resisted; that, despite the protests of conservative sociologists to the contrary, societies everywhere have indeed become polarised in terms of capital and labour. It is rapidly becoming a cliche, with no grounding in truth, that most of the population in Western capitalist nations are now middle class: Marx said that even those owning land and property could belong to the proletariat, since their mortgage liability meant that they were not truly owners of either. Moreover, to equate the success of capitalism with the failure of socialism is to misconceive their relation as one of outright opposition rather than as a blooming of humanity from a self-exhausting machine. Marxism serves as a perpetual reminder that poverty, illiteracy, crime, political oppression, and the stifling of mass human potential 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 at present, it may be that the arguments of Marx and Engels must enter into sustained dialogue and possible compromise with both the apologists of this economic system and those espousing humanitarian causes within it. Nevertheless, as long as human poverty, immiseration and oppression exist, whether under the banner of liberalism, communism or religious fundamentalism, the arguments of Marx will retain their motivational foundation and their relevance in human affairs.
 

Bibliography
 

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McLellan, David. Karl Marx, Modern Masters (New York: Viking Press, 1975).