Karl Marx has been the hero of socialists and the deity of communists. My book, Socialism, addresses the life, the writings and theories of Marx in some detail, since his thinking is basically the foundation of socialism. Even the socialist who claims he is not a follower of Marx generally follows the same principles and evinces the same preferences as other socialists who do follow Marx. I introduce this topic here with a synopsis of a chapter on Marx from the book.
To understand why the spirit of Marxist socialism is bitter and negative, one should know a little bit about Marx’s life. Somewhat surprisingly, it was founded upon a secure childhood. Since he never held a job, Marx was never an exploited worker. As a student he studied philosophy and religion, but thought very little of religion. He married Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen, but there was little class struggle in the marriage. For political reasons, he was not able to become a professor, so he went into journalism. Because of the opposition engendered by his radical views, he spent time being expelled from various places in Germany, France and England. For quite some time, Marx’s unwilling parents supported him and his family. As a library researcher, writing radical tracts and tomes on economic theory, he received no salary. But he did receive some help from his friend and colleague, Friedrich Engels. He owed that help to the textile factory of Engels’s father and to its exploited workers. From them Marx received a pittance, which, tragically, was insufficient for all his family to survive.
Marx’s most famous writings were The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, the latter being a three-volume critique of capitalism. The first volume of Kapital took him ten years to complete and the next two volumes were published posthumously by Engels. Critics tend to believe the publication postponement beyond Marx’s death was a result of the author’s dissatisfaction with his own attempt to resolve the incongruities in his theory of value. He never could free the theory of contradiction.
Marx wrote about a large number of philosophical and political issues, presenting theories he mostly borrowed from other scholars. He always found flaws in the theories others had developed, but he generally modified or embellished such theories rather than develop many of his own. He came to economics a little later and that topic became the foundation of his multi-volume work on capitalism, Das Kapital.
He ultimately devoted the bulk of his time to the study of economics, trying to resolve inconsistencies in his theory of value, which was outdated from its inception. He focused on Ricardo’s labor theory of value, emphasizing that labor created value and that the capitalist stole that value from the workers. The laborers contracted with the capitalist to work a given (large) number of hours at a wage that would give them no more than a subsistence level of living. They agreed to work a twelve-hour day, for example, but could produce enough output in eight hours to earn their pay. Anything they produced in the last four hours of the day’s work Marx called surplus value. Naturally the capitalist pocketed all of that value for himself, letting the workers earn only enough for their subsistence living.
Marx’s writings and actions were filled with the spirit of hatred for the capitalist. He considered the writings of previous socialists as “utopian socialism,” based on optimistic hopes that things would go better for workers if they voluntarily joined communitarian organizations. His own writings he considered “scientific socialism,” and they were based on the theoretical necessity of working men uniting in revolutionary action to exterminate the entire bourgeois class, thus eliminating the class struggle and opening the way for a future communistic society. Marx’s most striking achievement was to transform the utopians’ movement of love into a movement of hate.
To become an expert on Marx’s life and economic theory, as well as the modern theories stemming from the Marxian foundation, you are welcome to purchase the book Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States. The page for purchasing a copy is at the top of the website.
