KARL MARX

In 1845 Karl Marx was expelled from France and Germany for his revolutionary activities. He eventually settled in 1849 in London, where he spent many hours in the Reading Room of the British Library. He is buried in Highgate Cemetry.

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Dinesh ^club

Karl Marx (1818-83) was born in the German town of Trier. His parents were Jews who converted to Lutheranism when he was six, but he himself was militantly anti-religious by the time he was a teenager. His creed even then was: “Criticism of religion is the foundation of all criticism.” As a student he studied first law, then philosophy and history, and wrote his doctoral thesis in ancient Greek philosophy. His open hostility to religion meant that an academic career was closed to him, so he became a newspaper editor, though only briefly. Actually he did extremely little paid work in the course of his life: instead, he chose to live in poverty most of the time and pursue his studies and his writing. ~ Page 164

One reason why Marxism was to prove such a rich system of thought was that it fused together three intellectual traditions that were each already highly developed: German philosophy, French political theory, and British economics. It can therefore not be categorized simply as “philosophy” in the normal sense. Nevertheless it contained a major immense influence on a great deal of subsequent philosophical thinking. So no history of philosophy in the modern era could possibly disregard it. ~ Page 165

The philosophical element in Marxism was nearly all taken from Hegel, and has continued from that day to this to be expressed by Marxists in Hegel’s terminology. It is worth giving a checklist of ideas that are at the heart of Hegelianism and are also central to Marxism: one, that reality is not a state of affairs but an ongoing historical process; two, that because of this, the key to understanding reality is to understand the nature of historical change; three, that historical change is not random but obeys a discoverable law; four, that the discoverable law to change in the dialectic, with its repeated triadic movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; five, that what keeps this law perpetually in operation is alienation, which ensures that each successive state of affairs is eventually brought to an end by its own internal contradictions; six, that the process is not under the control of human beings, but is driven forward by its own internal laws, and human beings are swept along by it; seven, that the process is thus described will continue until a situation is reached in which all internal contradictions have been resolved: there will then be no alienation, and therefore no longer any force at work promoting change; eighty, that when this conflict-free situation is reached, human beings will no longer be swept along by forces outside their control, but will be able for the first time to take their destiny into their own hands, and will become themselves the arbiters of change; nine, that this will for the first time make human freedom and self fulfilment possible for human beings; the, that the form of society within which this freedom will be exercised, and self-fulfillment achieved, will not be the atomized society of independently functioning individuals that is envisaged by liberals, but an organic society in which individuals are absorbed into a whole that is much bigger and therefore more fulfilling, than their own separate lives. ` Page 165

2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

The Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, The point is to change it ~ Karl Marx

2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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