Karl Marx Essay Research Paper The worker

Karl Marx Essay, Research Paper

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production

increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more

commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in

direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only

commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity — and does so in the

proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)

The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is without a

doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century. Although he

was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political

ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until

quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be

Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often

been modified and his meanings adapted to a great variety of political circumstances. In

addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that is

been only recently that scholars had the opportunity to appreciate Marx’s intellectual

stature.

Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river

Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818. He came a long line of rabbis on both sides of his

family and his father, a man who knew Voltaire and Lessing by heart, had agreed to

baptism as a Protestant so that he would not lose his job as one of the most respected

lawyers in Trier. At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the

University of Bonn. At Bonn he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter

of Baron von Westphalen , a prominent member of Trier society, and man responsible for

interesting Marx in Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year

Marx’s father sent him to the more serious University of Berlin where he remained four

years, at which time he abandoned his romanticism for the Hegelianism which ruled in

Berlin at the time.

Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group, which included

the theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss, produced a radical critique of

Christianity and, by implication, the liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy. Finding

a university career closed by the Prussian government, Marx moved into journalism and,

in October 1842, became editor, in Cologne, of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a

liberal newspaper backed by industrialists. Marx’s articles, particularly those on economic

questions, forced the Prussian government to close the paper. Marx then emigrated to

France.

Arriving in Paris of the end of 1843, Marx rapidly make contact with organized groups of

.migr. German workers and with various sects of French socialists. He also edited the

short-lived Deutsch-Franz.sische Jahrb.cher which was intended to bridge French

socialism and the German radical Hegelians. During his first few months in Paris, Marx

became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which remained unpublished until the

1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism,

influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the

alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human

beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. He was also in Paris that

Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).

Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844 and with Engels, moved to Brussels

where he remained for the next three years, visiting England where Engels’ family had

cottons spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an

intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the materialist

conception of history. This he developed in a manuscript (published posthumously as The

German Ideology), of which the basic thesis was that “the nature of individuals depends

on the material conditions determining their production.” Marx traced the history of the

various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one — industrial

capitalism — and its replacement by communism.

At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he also wrote a polemic

(The Poverty of Philosophy) against the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon

(1809-1865). He also joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German

.migr. workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major

theoreticians. At a conference of the League i

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