3.4: Karl Marx as an Enlightenment Thinker
Read this chapter, which gives a brief overview of the historical and political context in which Marx and Engels studied and wrote.
Watch this video, which gives an overview of Marx's life and work.
Study Guide Questions:
- What does Marx say is the main source of conflict throughout history?
- Why does Marx think that the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule?
- According to Marx, why are laborers forced to sell their labor for the lowest possible wages?
- Explain Marx's views on the relationship between religion and capitalism.
- Why does Marx think that capitalism inevitably creates its own destruction?
3.4.1: Alienation and Secular Governance
Read this text. In his essay On the Jewish Question, Marx takes issue with Bruno Bauer, one of his colleagues among the Young Hegelians. Bauer had earlier made an argument against Jewish emancipation from the German Christian state from an atheist perspective, arguing that religion whether Jewish or Christian was a barrier to emancipation. In responding to Bauer, Marx introduces his distinction between political emancipation in form of liberal rights and liberties, and human emancipation, which encompasses an end to alienation from our work and from each other.
3.4.2: The Marxian Challenge
Watch this lecture, which presents Marx's works on economics and society as definitively a part of the Enlightenment tradition in political and economic thought as that of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill.
Read this preface, which constitutes a sketch of Marx's framework for historical materialism. He argues that the nature of a society's economic structure depends upon the degree of development of the productive forces or means of production, meaning human labor conjoined with technology. The relations of production or superstructure, meaning the political and legal institutions of society, is in turn explained by the nature of the economic structure. Revolution occurs, however, when the forces of production are stifled by the superstructure, which is replaced by a structure better suited to preside over the continued development of the forces of production.
3.4.3: Marx's Theory of Capitalism
Read this chapter. Marx begins by establishing two necessary conditions for commodity production: (i) a market and (ii) a social division of labor where people make different things. For Marx, commodities both have a use-value, and an exchange-value or price, but it is the latter which is problematic. In coming to understand why one commodity is priced differently from another, Marx derives his labor theory of value.
3.4.4: From Capitalism to Socialism to Communism
Read this chapter, in which Marx shows the effects of his law that within a capitalist economic structure, the tendency of the rate of profit must fall. This leads to increasing intensity of exploitation as well as other effects that contribute to the downfall of capitalism.
Read this work, in which Marx describes the transition from a capitalist to a socialist to a communist society, and it is here where he describes communism as a society in which each person should contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need.
Watch this lecture, which focuses on the technical, as opposed to normative, aspects of Marxian exploitation, and how Marx believed a socialist economic structure is the logical successor to a capitalist economic structure, which would in turn develop into a communist economic structure.
3.4.5: Alienation: Separating Workers from the Results of Their Work
Read this article, which addresses the question as to why we should study Marx today, and gives an overview of a contemporary strain of political thought called Analytical Marxism. From there, the importance of the principle of self-ownership in Marx's framework is traced, and how that principle corresponds to contemporary debates regarding distributive justice, and particularly "the difference principle" in the work of John Rawls.
Watch this lecture, which focuses both on the empirical failures of Marx's predictions and theoretical inconsistencies in his framework, and the influence his work has had on late 19th and 20th century political thought.
3.4.6: Understanding Modes of Production (Materialism)
As you are already aware, The Communist Manifesto reflects an attempt to explain the goals of communism, as well as the theory underlying this movement. Both Engels and Marx argue that class struggles are the motivations for all historical developments - mostly between the "proletariat" and the "bourgeois". Who comprises these classes and why have they, according to the authors, created such class conflict?
Post your response in the discussion forum, and check back to see what some of your classmates have written. Feel free to leave comments on the posts of your classmates.