Karl Marx
Reading about Karl Marx because he is an often talked about character, and I don't know much about him.
Definitions
- Historical Materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods.
- In international law, a stateless person is someone who is
not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law
. - In political science, the term class conflict, or class struggle, refers to the economic antagonism and political tension that exist among social classes because of clashing interests, competition for limited resources, and inequalities of power in the socioeconomic hierarchy.
Notes
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and his three-volume Das Kapital; the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his endeavors.
Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, and received a doctorate in philosophy from the latter in 1841. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany in 1849 after writing The Communist Manifesto. Marx then moved to London where he wrote Das Kapital. He died stateless in 1883.
Marx's critiques of history, society and political economy hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that controls the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable the means by selling their labor power in return for wages. Employing hist historical materialist approach, Marx predicted that capitalism produced internal tensions like previous socioeconomic systems and that these tensions would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as the socialist mode of production. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism - owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature - would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers.
Marx's work in economics has had a strong influence on modern heterodox theories of labor and capital, and he is often cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.
Marx's father was the first in his family to receive a secular education and the first to not become a rabbi - he became a lawyer with a comfortably upper-middle class income. Marx's family was non-religious Jewish but had converted formally to Christianity before his birth. Marx was privately educated by his father until 1830 when he entered Trier High School. Although studying law, he was fascinated by philosophy and looked for a way to combine the two, believing that "without philosophy nothing could be accomplished". Marx became interested in the recently deceased German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas were then widely debated among European philosophical circles.[