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Karl MarxEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1843A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Karl Marx
Nearly a century and a half after he died in 1883, the German philosopher Karl Max remains one of the best-known and controversial thinkers of the modern world. For many on the left of the political spectrum, he is the preeminent theorist of modern capitalism, a pioneering figure who predicted many of the problems of life under industrial capitalism and identified the need for radical changes to underlying economic structures. For others who know him mainly as the leading voice of communism, he is associated with (if not responsible for) the many atrocities committed throughout the 20th century under communist regimes. Regardless of whether one admires or despises him, Marx changed philosophy by offering an intellectually rich analysis of capitalism and fusing it with a program of political revolution. Throughout his career, he carried on the tradition of German philosophical idealism by seeking to trace the movement of history toward some kind of rational conclusion. But unlike his predecessors such as Kant and Hegel, Marx directly participated in political movements he believed were helping to bring history toward that conclusion.
Marx viewed history as the struggle between rival economic classes. With the advent of industrial capitalism, which was rapidly transforming the world into its own image, all of humanity would eventually fall into one of two classes: the bourgeoisie (that is, the owners of the means of production), or the proletariat, meaning wage laborers. Capitalism would ultimately benefit only a tiny few, while everyone else would be reduced to conditions of misery. As depressing as this was, the creation of a desperate and international pool of workers who vastly outnumbered their masters made it inevitable he believed, that they would stage a revolution, seize the means of production, and share the produce of capitalism for everyone.
Marx believed that his native Germany, or England where he spent his later years, was ripe for revolution since capitalism reached advanced stages there. However, in the decades following Marx’s death, communist governments only took power in mostly pre-industrial societies like Russia, China, and Cuba, or in formerly colonized states such as North Korea and Vietnam. These developments contradicted (rather than expressed) Marx’s theory because he believed the success of communism depends on the gains in technology and productivity that happen under capitalism. Formerly industrial metropolises such as London and Chicago have sent most of their manufacturing overseas and instead house “invisible” industries like finance and insurance. Some interpret this as proof that Marx was wrong and that capitalism is far more durable than he predicted. Alternately, a series of recent financial crises and a massive growth of inequality suggests that Marxist analysis can still play a role in interpreting modern society and economics, whether or not one reaches the same conclusions Marx does.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
G. W. F. Hegel was a massively influential figure in German philosophy. He died when Marx was a teenager, and the university system that Marx later entered to pursue a philosophy PhD was dominated by students of Hegel. Marx would eventually break from the “Young Hegelians” from whom he received his philosophic training, but the Hegelian methodology would set the parameters for Marx’s philosophical project. Born in 1770, Hegel’s early life had a profound effect on his philosophic outlook. He began his academic career as a seminary student, in an environment steeped in religious and political conservatism at a time when the Enlightenment was challenging traditional notions of authority and celebrating the freedom of the individual. The clash between opposing ideological forces came to a head for Hegel in 1806. While teaching at the University of Jena, Napoleon’s forces obliterated the Prussian army just outside the city. For many Prussians, this was a traumatic experience, leading to a profound sense of separation from the world around them. Hegel would identify this mood of “alienation” as a defining feature of existence in an ever-changing modern world. The cure for alienation was to achieve a higher plane of self-consciousness, and the best way to raise one’s level of consciousness was for the knowledge derived from one’s own particular experiences to collide with something that seems to challenge or negate it. Further inquiry reveals that the seeming opposites can produce a “dialectical” synthesis, and so the individual starts to reconcile their sense of self with the world around them.
Hegel came to regard the Battle of Jena as “the end of history,” not that events would stop occurring, but that humanity’s ideological evolution had come to an end with Napoleon’s fusion of bureaucratic rigor and nationalist passion. After the fall of Napoleon, the Prussian state tried to reconstitute itself by preserving the best elements of monarchy and traditional Protestantism, while incorporating elements from Napoleon to encourage more proactive loyalty from the population and thereby increase its battlefield effectiveness. Marx would come to reject Hegel’s project as providing an intellectual cover for an oppressive system of industrial capitalism, but he would retain the concept of alienation as the main problem facing the workers as well as the dialectical method as the way for workers to improve knowledge of their condition. Some have argued that Hegel was “conservative” while Marx was revolutionary, but the real difference is the date and particular character of the revolution. For Hegel, it had already happened in his youth and had given rise to the nation-state, whereas for Marx it was imminent, and would lead to the utopia of a classless society.
Adam Smith
Best known for his works The Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith is still considered the chief intellectual defender of capitalism and thus became the chief antagonist of Karl Marx once he launched his philosophic critique of capitalism. Like Marx, Smith was not an economist as such but rather a philosopher who sought to understand how economic forces both derive from and help shape human behavior. His life extended from the early to late 18th century (1723-1790), a time for reexamining long-held beliefs regarding the source of wealth, particularly national wealth. For centuries, the states of Europe regarded the accumulation of precious metals as the most secure source of funding for building infrastructure and armed forces. They restricted trade with one another to keep from having to pay money into another’s national treasury while setting up colonies that were then required to buy exports from the mother country. Economics was subordinated to the needs of power politics.
Adam Smith became the most important voice for the revolutionary notion that governments should stay out of economic activity as much as possible. Shielding domestic producers against foreign competition incentivized them to lower quality and raise prices to the detriment of the consumer. Opening avenues for trade would carry several benefits, including freeing up the need to produce everything domestically. Instead, nations could focus on industries in which they had a competitive advantage. Free markets would ideally compel producers to innovate products and production methods to keep consumers happy and manage costs. By benefiting both producers and consumers, the government would also benefit from a larger and more sustainable tax base. The result was a national community much more thoroughly engaged in commerce than had been the case when the economy was strictly a matter of national policy. For Marx, this commenced a process of turning the individual into a mere commodity, especially when the small “cottage industries” that Smith had in mind transformed into the mighty factories, banks, and corporations of industrial Europe.
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