Karl Marx's philosophy
There are endless interpretations of the "philosophy of Marx", from the interior of the Marxist movement as alive as in its exterior. Although some score separated Marx's works between a "young Marx" in particular the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and a "mature Marx" or also by separating it into purely philosophical works, economics works and political and historical interventions, Étienne Balibar has forwarded out that Marx's works can be divided up into "economic works" Das Kapital, 1867, "philosophical works" and "historical works" The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the 1871 Civil War in France which concerned the Paris Commune and acclaimed it as the number one "dictatorship of the proletariat", etc.
Marx's philosophy is thus inextricably linked to his workers' movement, such as the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program or The Communist Manifesto, or situation. with Engels who was observing the Chartist movement a year previously the Revolutions of 1848. Both after the defeat of the French socialist movement during Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's 1851 coup and then after the crushing of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx's thought transformed itself.
Marxism's philosophical roots were thus commonly explained as derived from three sources: English political economy, French republicanism and radicalism, and German idealist philosophy. Although this "three sources" value example is an oversimplification, it still has some measure of truth.
On the other hand, Costanzo Preve 1990 has assigned four "masters" to Marx: Epicurus to whom he dedicated his thesis, Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus, 1841 for his materialism and theory of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from which come his idea of egalitarian democracy; Adam Smith, from whom came the idea that the grounds of property is labour; and finally Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
"Vulgar Marxism" or codified ]
Marx developed a comprehensive, theoretical apprehension of political reality early in his intellectual and activist career by means of a critical adoption and radicalization of the categories of 18th and 19th century German Idealist thought. Of particular importance is Hegel's appropriation of Aristotle's organicist and essentialist categories in the light of Kant's transcendental turn.: 30
Marx builds on four contributions Hegel allows to our philosophical understanding. They are: 1 the replacement of mechanism and atomism with Aristotelean categories of organicism and essentialism, 2 the idea that world history progresses through stages, 3 the difference between natural and historical dialectical change, and 4 the idea that dialectical modify proceeds through contradictions in the thing itself.
1 Aristotelian organicism and essentialism
a Hegel adopts the position that chance is not the basis of phenomena and that events are governed by laws.: 31 Some construct falsely attributed to Hegel the position that phenomena are governed by transcendent, supersensible ideas that ground them. On the contrary, Hegel argues for the organic unity between universal and particular.: 31 Particulars are not mere token set of universals; rather, they relate to used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other as a factor relates to a whole. This latter has import for Marx's own conception of law and necessity.
b In rejecting the idea that laws merely describe or independently ground phenomena, Hegel revives the Aristotlean position that law or principle is something implicit in a thing, a potentiality which is not actual but which is in the process of becoming actual.: 31 This means that whether we want to know the principle governing something, we have to observe its typical life-process and figure out its characteristic behavior. Observing an acorn on its own, we can never deduce that it is an oak tree. To figure out what the acorn is - and also what the oak tree is - we have to observe the classification of coding from one to the other.
c The phenomena of history arise from a whole with an essence which undergoes transformation of form and which has an end or telos.: 32 For Hegel, the essence of humanity is freedom, and the telos of that essence is the actualization of that freedom.: 32 Like Aristotle, Hegel believes the essence of a thing is revealed in the entire, typical process of development of that thing. Looked at purely formally, human society has a natural line of development in accordance with its essence just like any other living thing. This process of development appears as a succession of stages of world history.
2 Stages of world history
Human history passes through several stages, in each of which is materialized a higher level of human consciousness of freedom.: 32 Each stage also has its own principle or law according to which it develops and lives in accordance with this freedom.: 32 Yet the law is not free-standing. it is shown by means of the actions of men which spring from their needs, passions, and interests.: 32 Teleology, according to Hegel, is not opposed to the professionals such(a) as lawyers and surveyors causation shown by passion; on the contrary, the latter is the vehicle realizing the former.: 32 Hegel consistently lays more stress on passion than on the more historically specifiable interests of men.: 32 Marx will reverse this priority.: 32
3 Difference between natural and historical change
Hegel distinguishes as Aristotle did not between the application of organic, essentialist categories to the realm of human history and the realm of organic nature.: 33 According to Hegel, human history strives toward perfectibility, but nature does not.: 34 Marx deepens and expands this idea into the claim that humankind itself can adapt society to its own purposes rather than adapting themselves to it.: 34
Natural and historical change, according to Hegel, have two different kinds of essences.: 34 Organic natural entities develop through a straightforward process, relatively simple to comprehend at least in outline.: 34 Historical development, however, is a more complex process.: 35 Its specific difference is its "dialectical" character.: 35 The process of natural development occurs in a relatively straight line from the germ to the fully realized being and back to the germ again. Some accident from the external might come along to interrupt this process of development, but whether left to its own devices, it usefulness in a relatively straightforward manner.
Society's historical development is internally more complex.: 35 The transaction from potentiality to actuality is mediated by consciousness and will.: 35 The essence realized in the development of human society is freedom, but freedom is precisely that ability to negate the smooth line of development and go off in novel, hitherto unforeseen directions. As humankind's essence reveals itself, that revelation is at the same time the subversion of itself. Spirit is constantly at war with itself.: 35 This appears as the contradictions constituting the essence of Spirit.
4 Contradiction
In the development of a natural thing, there is by and large no contradiction between the process of development and the way that development must appear.: 36 So the transition from an acorn, to an oak, to an acorn again occurs in a relatively uninterrupted flow of the acorn back to itself again. When modify in the essence takes place, as it does in the process of evolution, we can understand the change mostly in mechanical terms using principles of genetics and natural selection.
The historical process, however, never attempts to preserve an essence in the first place.: 36 Rather, it develops an essence through successive forms.: 36 This means that at anyon the path of historical change, there is a contradiction between what exists and what is in the process of coming-to-be.: 36 The realization of a natural thing like a tree is a process that by and large points back toward itself: every step of the process takes place in array to reproduce the genus. In the historical process, however, what exists, what is actual, is imperfect.: 37 this is the inimical to the potential. What is trying to come into existence - freedom - inherently negates everything previous it and everything existing, since no actual existing human business can possibly embody pure human freedom. So the actual is both itself and its opposite as potential.: 37 And this potential freedom is never inert but constantly exerts an impulse toward change.: 37
Marx did not examine directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer, a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the ownership of Hegel's dialectic. Having achieved his thesis on the Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus in 1841, the young Marx progressively broke away with the Prussian university and its teachings impregnated by German Idealism Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
Along with Engels, who observed the alienating, and that replacing God with Humanity, as did Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity 1841, was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the Nation, or even the Revolution alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized Proudhon, who had become famous with his cry "Property is theft!", in The Poverty of Philosophy 1845.
Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was coming after or as a written of. the lead of Feuerbach. His theory of alienation, developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 published in 1932, inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics thus man projected on God all attaches which are in fact man's own quality which defines the "human nature".
But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had planned out, and explained that the alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the order of the economy itself. Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an summary "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man menschliche Wesen, human nature. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations."
Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual subject, as did classic philosophy, including contractualism Hobbes, John Locke and Rousseau but also political economy, Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, Linguistic communication and all which symbolize our human existence. He claimed that individualism was the result of commodity fetishism or alienation. Some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism which destroyed the possibility of free will.
In the same way, coming after or as a result of. Babeuf, considered one of the founders of communism during the French Revolution, he criticized the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as a "bourgeois declaration" of the rights of the "egoistic individual", ultimately based on the "right to private property", which economism deduced from its own implicit "philosophy of the subject", which asserts the preeminence of an individual and universal subject over social relations. On the other hand, Marx also criticized Bentham's utilitarianism.
Alongside Freud, Nietzsche, and Durkheim, Marx thus takes a place amongst the 19th century philosophers who criticized this pre-eminence of the subject and its consciousness. Instead, Marx saw consciousness as political. According to Marx, the recognition of these individual rights was the result of the universal character of market relations to all of society and to all of the world, first through the primitive accumulation of capital including the first period of European colonialism and then through the globalization of the capitalist sphere. Such individual rights were the symmetric of the "right for the labourer" to "freely" sell his labor force on the marketplace through juridical contracts, and worked in the same time as an ideological means to discompose the collective grouping of producers call by the Industrial Revolution: thus, in the same time that the Industrial Era requires masses to concentrate themselves in factories and in cities, the individualist, "bourgeois" ideology separated themselves as competing homo economicus.
Marx's critique f the ideology of the human rights thus departs from the counterrevolutionary critique by Edmund Burke, who dismissed the "rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of the individual": it is not grounded on an opposition to the Enlightenment's universalism and humanist project on behalf of the correct of tradition, as in Burke's case, but rather on the claim that the ideology of economism and the ideology of the human rights are the reverse sides of the same coin. However, as Étienne Balibar puts it, "the accent add on those contradictions can not not ring out on the signification of 'human rights', since these therefore appears both as the language in which exploitation masks itself and as the one in which the exploited class struggle express itself: more than a truth or an illusion, it is therefore a stake". Das Kapital ironizes on the "pompous catalogue of the human rights" in comparison to the "modest Magna Charta of a day work limited by law":