Marx, Karl (1818–83)
Marx, Karl (1818–83)
Karl Marx was hailed at his death as a ‘man of science’
who had made two great discoveries in but one
lifetime: ‘the law of development of human history,’
and ‘the special law of motion governing the present-
day capitalist mode of production’ (Engels 1980a, p.
429). In this graveside eulogy Marx’s longtime friend
and sometime co-author Friedrich Engels (1820–95)
likened the first of these great discoveries, previously
christened ‘the materialist interpretation of history’
(Engels 1980b, p. 470), to the formulation by Darwin
(1809–82) of ‘the law of development of organic
nature’ (Engels 1980a, p. 429). In other overviews of
Marx’s work, Engels linked Marx’s critical work on
political economy and capitalist society with a ‘dia-
lectical’ method in science derived, so he said, from the
philosopher Hegel (1770–1831). Engels wrote that
‘Marx was … the only one who could undertake the
work of extracting from the Hegelian logic the kernel
which comprises Hegel’s real discoveries’ (Engels
1980b, pp. 474–5). Moreover for Engels, science as
conceived by Marx was fully compatible with, and
indeed an integral part of, a revolutionary political
outlook and practice: ‘Science was for Marx a his-
torically dynamic, revolutionary force. … His real
mission in life was to contribute, in one way or
another, to the overthrow of capitalist society’ (Engels
1980b, p. 475).
Famously Marx himself denied that he was a
‘Marxist’ (Engels 1992, p. 356), whatever that may
have meant to himself, and to his friends and enemies
while he was alive. While the origins of Marxism lie in
Engels’s accounts of Marx’s life and works from 1859
onwards, and in Marx’s own published works and
manuscripts, Marxism as a science and as a political
movement dates from the years after Marx’s death in
1883. For over a century it has been an intellectual and
political force to be reckoned with, though the initial
presumption of methodological and doctrinal unity,
implied in the reference to an origin in one man and his
works, inevitably began to break down. On both the
intellectual and political fronts, the current age is one
of post-Marxism.
In another influential overview of Marx’s intel-
lectual career, V. I. Lenin (1870–1924) suggested that
Marx combined German philosophy, English political
economy, and French socialism and revolutionary
doctrines in a unique way (Lenin 1964, p. 50). Most
intellectual biographies proceed chronologically and
thematically through this list. However, in setting out
what distinguishes Marx as a social scientist, and what
contributions Marxism has made to social science, it is
more productive to take the direct approach and to
outline the characteristics of the Marxian synthesis.
This will necessitate some contextual discussion of
what science and philosophy meant in Marx’s time
and milieu, and what sort of political strategies and
9280
actions were possible for a committed socialist when
even constitutional politics was radical and subversive.
1. Science and Philosophy
Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in Trier in the
Rhineland. His family were converted or at least
nonpracticing Jews, and he had a classical and liberal
education. This took him to the faculties of law and
philosophy at Bonn and Berlin universities in the mid-
1830s to the early 1840s, preparing him, rather
inadvertently, for a career as a progressive journalist
and political radical. This was a time of political
reaction in the German states when liberals, especially
students, resisted the authoritarian doctrines and
practices of self-styled autocrats. Liberals argued
instead for representative and responsible government
that would protect individual rights to free expression
and institute a socioeconomic system favorable to
individual mobility. While this may sound familiar
enough to present-day readers, the political dialogue
of Marx’s time now seems laden with obscure philo-
sophical and religious issues. This was partly the result
of heavy government censorship imposed on overtly
political pronouncements, and partly the result of the
requirements of the debate: what facts and arguments
would sustain a doctrine of popular sovereignty
against the reigning doctrines of absolutist rule by
divine right?
The Hegelian idealist philosophy within which these
coded political debates took place was itself con-
troversial in relation to the Trinitarian truths of the
Christian confession, and this had indeed been recently
and notoriously explored by the historian D. F.
Strauss (1808–74) in his Life of Jesus (1835), and by
the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) in his
Essence of Christianity (1841, 2nd edn., 1843). Marx
was swift to draw the radical conclusion of atheism
from these writings, and to align himself with a ‘new’
materialism rooted in human experience, which he
defined as materially productive and historically
changing. In the 1830s and 1840s, and particularly in
the German-speaking world, ‘science’ as Wissenschaft
referred to knowledge in the broadest sense system-
atically presented. Moreover the tradition of natural
philosophy was central to this conception of science,
which did not readily admit any great distinction in
method between natural and human subjects of study.
Science as Wissenschaft relied on scholastic concepts
and commonsensical observation, rather than on
mathematical abstraction and testable hypotheses.
Hegelian idealist philosophy was in any case utterly
hostile to a materialist ontology of matter-in-motion
and an empiricist epistemology through which truth is
assigned to concepts in so far as they coincide with the
material world. The later nineteenth century saw the
rise of materialist accounts of the natural sciences as

empirical modes of study. Subsequently the develop-
ment in the early twentieth century of the modern
social and behavioral sciences was modeled on these
scientific presuppositions and practices. In any case
English-language philosophy has been hostile to
philosophical idealism, and very closely aligned
with philosophical empiricism, since the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. It follows that Marx’s early
works, and the overarching conception of science ex-
tending through his later works, can be quite difficult
to understand from a later vantage point in the twenty-
first century. Certainly the reader must be very careful
in noting any claims in Marx about what ‘science’ is
supposed to be, so that his thought can be understood
without anachronism.
In so far as Marx’s notions of science have been
influential, a conception of science rooted in idealist
Wissenschaft has thus survived and flourished. This
conception may not cover all conceptions of science
within Marxism, nor is it necessarily exactly aligned
with those that claim to be Hegelian in origin. Rather
it is distinguished by these features:
(a) a focus on human ideas as the medium through
which science itself exists, rather than a view that
knowledge about humanity must in some sense mirror
knowledge of the physical world;
(b) a presumption that throughout history the
human focus on what is true and meaningful will
change, rather than a presumption that truths are fixed
by realities outside of human experience;
(c) a view of science as a form of practical knowledge
developed for, and incorporated within, a compre-
hensive range of human activities, rather than as a
realm of abstract truth sought for its own sake by
objective observers and politically neutral scientists;
and
(d) a political presumption that a critical evaluation
of present practice, including practices of power
and politics, is a necessary condition for productive
science, rather than a presumption that proper science
is necessarily unconcerned with its own political
context, or a view that it simply does not have one
worthy of notice.
2. Natural Science and Social Science
For Marx science was itself a unity, and natural
science was an activity within, rather than a model for,
the human social world. The master science, in his
view, was political economy, precisely because it dealt
with industry (including technology and natural sci-
ence) and society as a system of productive relation-
ships and regular interactions. However, what he had
in mind was a highly reformed version of the works of
political economy that he had available at the time,
and a version informed by his political project, which
was to promote the interests of wage-workers and
others in material need.
Marx, Karl (1818–83)
These ideas and concerns surfaced in Marx’s early
journalism, published when Prussian censorship was
comparatively relaxed in 1842, and in his notebooks
and manuscripts from the following two years, during
which time his newspaper was closed down, and as he
says, he ‘retired into his study.’ Marx had only limited
contact at this time with the social science of political
economy, and in common with other German readers,
he viewed writers such as Adam Smith (1723–90),
Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), and Sir James Steuart
(1712–80) through the medium of Hegel’s synthetic
and critical philosophizing on this subject, particularly
in the Philosophy of Right (1821). This work was
subjected to a lengthy critique in 1843, unpublished by
Marx in his lifetime, and by 1844 he had also
completed a set of ‘Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts,’ again unpublished until the 1930s.
While there is of course controversy over the re-
lationship between these works and those that Marx
wrote later in life, there are demonstrable continuities
in terms of text and project that confirm the early
1840s as the period when Marx’s critique of the
economic categories was truly launched.
Politically the young Marx aimed to produce a
critique of political economy informed by his own
version of some of the principles of socialism and
communism that were then current. These were mostly
French in origin, and derived from the writings of
Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Charles Fourier
(1772–1837), E; tienne Cabet (1788–1856). Marx was
also influenced by more contemporary writers such as
Moses Hess (1812–75), who identified (rather hope-
fully) the newly emerging industrial poor as prime
movers in socialist politics. At this juncture the
relationship between socialism as a political doctrine,
and social science as the pursuit of knowledge about
society, may seem tenuous. However, in the intel-
lectual and political context of the time the very notion
that ‘society’ needed a scientific investigation was
itself subversive and ‘socialistic.’ The established
monarchical order was content by contrast to rely
on Biblical fundamentalism, commonsensical conser-
vatism, and vigorous repression of any ‘free thinking’
that might stir up issues concerning social class and
political power. This ‘free thinking’ was exactly what
both liberalism and socialism were about, and the two
constituted a potent alliance at the time, albeit with
many in-built tensions around social class, political
participation, and economic systems.
After the revolutionary events of 1848–9 Marx went
into exile in England, and during the remainder of his
life, his political involvements were necessarily rather
problematic in that context. As he himself noted,
London was an excellent center for studying both the
social science of political economy and the industrial
and commercial life that it theorized. While the English
tradition in political economy (actually more Scottish
than English) was empiricist in its assumptions and
methods (rather than idealist, as was German tra-
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Marx, Karl (1818–83)
dition), it was at this stage not rigorously mathematical
nor deductive, as it became in the 1870s after the work
of William Stanley Jevons (1835–82) and other
pioneers of the ‘marginalist’ revolution. Central to
Marx’s critique was the work of David Ricardo
(1772–1823), whose On the Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation (1817, 3rd edn., 1821) is
classically descriptive and deductive in a mode of
natural philosophy not far removed from Aristotelian
conceptions. Ricardo defined and explicated the
origins of wealth in terms of commercial value, relating
this to the human labor involved in manufacture, and
assuming the distribution of wages, profit and rent to
the ‘three great classes’ that necessarily constitute
modern societies. Marx’s critique of this influential
view was both political, arguing that class-divided
societies are but a transitional phenomenon, and
technical, arguing that Ricardo’s concept of labor
could not account for the accumulation of profit
through the exchange of value. This critique was
published in stages, most notably Capital, Vol. 1
(1867) and has been subsequently enlarged with edited
versions of manuscripts for succeeding volumes and
studies.
Marx died on March 14, 1883 in London of natural
causes, after 35 years of exile from his native Rhenish
Prussia. While other ‘’48 ers’ managed to settle their
differences with the regime and to regain their civil
rights, Marx made only infrequent nonpolitical visits
to Germany, and was resolved to maintain his family
home in England. He had married Jenny von
Westphalen in 1843, and by 1855 they had three
surviving daughters, having lost two sons and another
daughter (Franziska) to childhood illnesses, certainly
exacerbated by harsh financial circumstances. Since
1962 it has been claimed that Marx was the father of
Frederick Demuth, the illegitimate son of the family
housemaid, but the alleged evidence for this is highly
suspect. Marx’s wife and daughter (Jenny) both
predeceased him by some months, and his two
surviving daughters (Laura and Eleanor) both took
their own lives some decades later. Against the obvious
gloom and despair of family life in the political
wilderness, there are memoirs and recollections extant
of a happy and cultivated family life, of Marx’s evident
and loving affection for his wife and daughters, and his
intense grief at the death of his two sons, Edgar and
Guido.
3. Marx and Engels
Any interpretation of Marx is complicated by the fact
that from 1844 until the end of his life he worked
closely with Friedrich Engels. Though they wrote
only three major works together, they engaged in an
extensive and well-preserved correspondence (over
7,000 letters between them are currently extant). They
also worked in tandem with political groups, par-
9282
ticularly those promoting international co-operation
among socialists, such as the International Working
Men’s Association (1864–76). Engels was a very
considerable author and publicist before he met Marx,
and was at that time the more famous of the two. He
was also an autodidact, having availed himself of
lectures and student discussions at Berlin University
while he was in the army on Prussian national service.
Engels was already a participant in the coded politics
of post-Hegelian philosophy, and in the German
appropriation of ‘English’ political economy, pub-
lishing an outline ‘Critique’ in 1844 that influenced
Marx significantly. Engels also published an analytical
and descriptive account of industrial poverty in The
Condition of the Working Class in England (1845),
based on published sources and the testimony of his
own eyes in Manchester.
As indicated above Engels was a notable publicist
and popularizer in connection with Marx’s work, and
the biographical, intellectual, and political context
developed in his accounts from 1859 onwards set a
profound though not unquestioned model for inter-
preting Marx. By the later 1860s it is evident from
Engels’s own works that he himself was increasingly
influenced by the development of chemistry and
physics as rigorous and mathematically precise
sciences, closely linked with industrial processes and
with the formulation of a philosophy of science. This
eventually flowered as positivism, the view that truth
of any kind can only follow from the presuppositions
and protocols of a singular scientific method, and that
the archetypes for this were physics and chemistry as
they progressed to increasingly elegant and powerful
theorizations and applications.
Engels’s grand project in the 1870s was pursued in
his own published works until his death in 1895. This
was a synthesis of Hegelian ‘dialectics,’ which he
admired for its ability to cope with change and
contradiction, with the natural scientific materialism,
on a positivist model, that was proving so successful
in the laboratory and the factory. Engels formulated
three laws of ‘dialectics’: unity of opposites, negation
of the negation, transformation of quantity into
quality (Engels 1987, pp. 111–32). His view was that
the discoveries of the natural sciences could be de-
coupled from the logical atomism and reductionism
that empiricism usually implied, and linked instead
to unifying ‘dialectical’ laws of nature, history, and
logic itself. This then would unify and transcend
materialism and idealism, science and philosophy,
practical truth and logical judgment.
The extent to which Marx came to endorse this
system, or even to lean in this direction at all, is keenly
debated, and the evidence—textual and biographical
—is deeply ambiguous. One of the chief difficulties
here is achieving an understanding of Marx and his
work that is not already deeply influenced by the
canons of interpretation set by Engels, as only in that
way could these questions be resolved. Moreover

Engels was not only Marx’s first biographer, but also
the biographer of their relationship, as well as legatee
and editor of Marx’s manuscripts, and authoritative
voice on ‘Marx.’ Engels was the founder of what was
becoming, largely through his own efforts at popu-
larizing and developing Marx’s ideas, a body of
‘dialectical’ thought and socialist practice known as
‘Marxism.’ Chief amongst the terms he used to
promote these views was ‘scientific socialism,’ coined
during the late 1870s and widely publicized.
4. Engels and Marxism
Science from Engels’s perspective was far more influen-
tial within socialist practice, and also within the
developing social sciences, than any conception of
science based on a fresh reading of Marx’s works. This
is unsurprising, given the biographical and political
circumstances, and the philosophies of science and
social science current from the 1890s through the
1920s. Engels coined the term ‘materialist inter-
pretation of history’ (later denominated ‘historical
materialism’) and also the notion of ‘materialist dia-
lectics’ (later reformulated by one of his intellectual
successors, Georgii Plekhanov (1856–1918), as ‘dia-
lectical materialism’).
In this way Marxism was generally expounded as
an outlook that integrated philosophical truth and
political practice. This was done by presenting history,
that is human society in a developmental sequence, as
an instance of scientific knowledge. This scientific
knowledge, in turn, was said to be consistent with
unifying ‘dialectical’ laws of nature and logic. Those
laws were themselves reflections of the only cosmic
reality, that of matter-in-motion, as studied by natural
scientists. In that way for Engels, as for Marxists,
social science was but a branch of the natural sciences
and of philosophical logic, provided that these systems
of knowledge were properly understood as unified by
a ‘great basic process’ that was itself dialectical, and so
properly captured in Engels’s three laws.
In practice Marxist social science was typically
organized by the notion that ‘history is the history of
class struggles’, laid out by Marx and Engels in their
Communist Manifesto of 1848, and illustrated in the
abbreviated account of history as successive ‘modes
of production’ offered by Marx in his Preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(1859), briefly footnoted in Capital, Vol. 1. Marxists
defined contemporary political struggle as necessarily
and profoundly a struggle between the owners of
capital (the bourgeoisie or commercial classes) and the
proletarians or workers (those who have nothing to
sell but their labor), so their methodology was not
merely historical but immediately strategic.
Tactically there were of course numerous difficulties
in identifying classes and class-fractions and in finding
or rejecting coalition partners for working-class
Marx, Karl (1818–83)
interests. Indeed it was also difficult to define the
short- and longer-term interests of the any group of
workers at all, particularly with respect to religion,
nationalism, and numerous other political expressions
of identity and purpose. However, in terms of social
science there is no doubt that Marxists were amongst
the leaders in studying and publicizing industrial
poverty, class divisions in society, and social protest
and revolution. While pre-Marxist political economy
was not entirely devoid of a concern for industrial
workers as human beings and as political agents, it was
not at all comfortable with the idea of any ‘more or
less veiled civil war’ (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 495).
Marxist social science inverted the rather functionalist
assumptions of traditional political economy and
declared that such warfare was an inevitable stage on
the way to human emancipation.
Under communism greater wealth would be pro-
duced and distributed in ways far more humane
than any money-system of commercial exchange
could ever allow. While communism was not itself
theorized in any detail, either by Marx or Engels
or by subsequent Marxists, the class struggle was
itself documented and pursued with single-minded
thoroughness. Despite the claims of a dialectical unity
of all the social, natural, and logical sciences, this
work was persuasive and respected to the extent that it
was empirical and evidential. Any claim that Marxism
genuinely established a social science different in
principles and character from ‘bourgeois’ science
founders on a point of incommensurability (i.e.,
conventional social scientists did not regard it as
science at all because of the ‘dialectical’ claims,
whatever the results) or on a point of disjunction (i.e.,
the ‘dialectical’ claims about social science were not
the basis of the science that Marxists actually did,
whatever their protestations). In practice self-avowed
Marxists focused on class division in industrial
societies and characteristically did a social science that
claimed to be both scientific and political; conversely
any social science preoccupied with working-class
poverty was often suspected of Marxist political intent
that would bias any scientific results. Clearly, different
conceptions of science, and of its relationship with
politics, have been operative within the social sciences;
Marxist social science highlights and largely
constitutes this area of debate.
5. Orthodoxies and Re
isionisms
Marxism became an orthodoxy once it had been
challenged, most notably by ‘revisionists’ in the later
1890s. While this was initially a political challenge
concerning the nature and timing of socialist rev-
olution, further doubts were raised concerning the
dialectical philosophy of the sciences espoused by
Engels and the specific propositions of Marx’s critique
of political economy. By the 1920s Gyo$ rgy Luka! cs
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Marx, Karl (1818–83)
could write that orthodoxy in Marxism refers ex-
clusively to method. This position reflected the success
of the marginalist revolution in economics, which
isolated Marx’s critique of political economy as
irrelevant, given that traditional political economy
had been effectively superseded. It also reflected the
success of more sympathetic attempts to adapt Marx’s
economic work on capitalism to a form of economics
that would at least be intelligible to the mainstream.
And most of all it reflected a process of rethinking
Marx that was just beginning.
This process was aided by the first attempts to
produce Marx’s published and unpublished works in
accessible form (the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe of
the 1920s and 1930s, edited initially by D. B.
Ryanzanov). Engels was of course in the edition as
well, and the production of his works alongside Marx’s
inevitably led to comparisons and questions con-
cerning the consistency of their views, particularly
with regard to Engels’s claims concerning dialectics
and science. These questions of interpretation could
be answered either way, but most readers were
encouraged to see a coincidence of views between the
two and to keep the assumptions of orthodoxy intact.
This was unsurprising given the political impetus to
unity, and to validating a Marxist tradition, that
successive scholarly and popular editions of ‘Marx
and Engels’ reinforced. Engels himself, in his foun-
dational 1859 review of Marx’s A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy, stressed the uniqueness
and power of Marx’s method even at that early date,
suggesting that Marx used both a historical and logical
method, and that the two were consistent and co-
incident.
As the working-class uprisings of the 1920s were
suppressed, and as the vacuity of Stalinist thought
became evident, ‘western’ Marxism became more
theoretical, more concerned with philosophical and
methodological issues, more focused on intellectuals
than political leaders, and more academically situated
in universities and research institutes, most famously
the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt (in the
1930s, and then in a post-Nazi Diaspora). The grander
claims of Engelsian synthesis were dropped in favor of
multidisciplinary inquiry (taking in psychoanalysis,
popular culture, imperialism, ethics, and morality, for
example). Explanatory reductionism to class (meaning
a person’s relationship to the means of production)
was replaced by a multifactor approach to causation,
and an interpretative turn towards diagnosis and
persuasion. This latter took place within a ‘re-
Hegelianizing’ of Marx, levering him out of an
Engelsian frame of scientific causation, explanation
and prediction, and emphasizing his work in con-
ceptualizing long-term phenomena and overarching
structures in social development.
This signals an adaptive process whereby Marx has
been successively reinterpreted for the social sciences
as the intellectual climate, particularly in philosophy
9284
of science, has changed. Engels cast Marx in the
shadow of Darwin’s ‘discoveries’ and of a positivist ac-
count of natural science (doing considerable violence
to Hegel in the process). Later Marxists reinterpreted
Marx in the light of neo-Kantian epistemologies and
ethical doctrines, and in the light of the burgeoning
empirical social sciences. After World War II Marxists
such as Louis Althusser (1918–90) adapted Marx to
structuralism, producing an account of history and
social development that reduced human agency to a
mere effect of economically driven and only partly
predictable large-scale social forces. Althusser pro-
posed to distinguish a nonscientific Marx from a
scientist, and Marx was said to have attained this by
making an epistemological ‘break’ and so expunging
any trace of Hegelian idealism. Althusser’s project
was never satisfactorily completed and is noteworthy
for its method, that of an intense and large-scale
rereading of Marx, always attempting to fit his ideas
into a binarized frame, e.g., nonscience versus science,
humanist versus materialist.
Perhaps unsurprisingly the contrary reading, that
the apparently Hegelian, ‘humanist’ Marx of the early
works is the valuable one, gathered strength at about
the same time. Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts’ of 1844 were published for the first time
in French and English in the late 1950s, and attracted
considerable attention from scholars and readers who
were intellectually or temperamentally repelled by the
aridities of orthodox dialectics. Any social science
presupposes various facts or truths about human
beings (or ‘man,’ as he appeared in those days before
feminist critique). The ‘humanist’ Marx was also a
reflection of dissatisfaction with behaviorist models
that pictured humans as reactive systems, responding
to stimuli in predictable ways. The 1844 manuscripts
could be read in isolation from any other works by
Marx, and frequently were. They appeared to be self-
contained meditations on human nature and history,
delineating a story of necessary and progressive
interactions with nature leading ultimately to the high
productivity of modern industry and the discoveries in
the natural sciences that made this possible.
Marx’s early manuscripts present ‘man’ as an
inherently social being, necessarily engaged in a
sensuous ‘metabolism’ with nature, which is effectively
an external but essential part of the body. Labor, in
Marx’s view, is not merely a vital activity for satisfying
needs (as with animals), but rather in the case of
humans a ‘free conscious’ activity that takes human
life itself to be an object and fashions things ‘according
to the laws of beauty.’ Humans produce even when
free from physical need, and only truly produce when
production is freely undertaken. This claim is meant to
have descriptive force, distinguishing self-conscious
and self-reflexive activity undertaken by humans from
the life-activities undertaken by animals, said by Marx
to be merely self-identical with what they do. Humans,
in his view, produce themselves in different ways, as

different kinds of people (intellectually and physically)
in different productive cultures. Communism, in this
scheme, is a way of making this self-constructing
process more explicit in terms of egalitarian decision
making in society.
The inverse of communism that Marx portrays
in his manuscripts is the contemporary world of
‘alienated’ labor, in which the worker is estranged in
terms of possession and power from the products
of labor, other workers, nature, society at large,
and from the quintessential human species-activity,
namely creative work. This philosophical analysis sets
a context for the consideration of private property as
the contemporary system through which production
and exchange takes place, and Marx offers his account
of ‘man’ as an alternative to the schemes developed
in classic texts of political economy, most notably
the highly individualized yet commercially minded
hunters and fishermen portrayed in the work of Adam
Smith (1723–90). ‘Alienation’ is used as a general term
by Marx for detailing the specifics of class division in
commercial societies, and in the early manuscripts he
endeavored to spell these out with respect to workers,
and also to nonworkers (though he spent little time on
this). The thrust of Marx’s argument was towards the
overthrow of capitalist society as in no one’s interest as
a human being. This was precisely because material
and psychological deprivation contradicted the in-
herent potential of the human species-being. Not-
withstanding the political and metaphysical tinge
to Marx’s exposition, alienation functioned in the
1960s and 1970s as an empirical catchall concept
for sociological and psychological research into and
evaluation of modern industrial processes.
Perhaps the most significant development in
Marxist social science in the later twentieth century
has been the discovery and appropriation of the work
of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a communist trade
union activist imprisoned by the Fascist government
from 1926 to 1935. During his years in prison he
composed a lengthy set of political notebooks, which
gradually became available after World War II. His
views have a distinct affinity with those of the early
Luka! cs and other ‘Hegelian’ Marxists, at least to
the extent that he departed decisively from the sup-
posed certainties and mechanistic models of dialectical
materialism. While he did not have access to Marx’s
early manuscripts, again there is an affinity with the
style of thought and political thrust of these works.
Gramsci was in any case facing the problem that a
proletarian revolution, declared inevitable by ortho-
dox Marxism, did not seem to be happening in a
steady historical development. Far from class position
translating easily into political radicalism, his analysis
revealed that cultural conservatism was deeply in-
grained in peasts and workers, and that inculcating
class-conscious political activism would necessitate an
ideological counteroffensive to this already existing
‘hegemony.’ His work inspired a Marxist social science
Marx, Karl (1818–83)
deeply concerned with tracing the flow of power in
society into channels that were not reducible, or not
directly reducible, to class position and economic
circumstances. Ideas, ideologies, and institutions all
became much more important in constructing an
analysis of contemporary class politics and a set of
political strategies and tactics. While this may have
seemed to de-emphasize Marx’s lifelong project—a
critique of the economic categories—it actually
mirrored the methodology and content of his writings
on contemporary politics, notably The Class Struggles
in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (1852). This Gramscian reading of Marx,
then, is another way that he has been reread and
reinterpreted, taking a fresh look at which of his texts
is most relevant to the times.
For the social sciences Marx and Marxism offer a
rich and varied tradition of inquiry and debate, posing
difficult questions about objectivity and neutrality in a
social science, about what sort of knowledge counts as
scientific, and about what sort of intellectual and
practical activity science as a whole actually is. These
questions may be answered in terms of contextualized
readings of Marx, of Engels, of Marxism, and of later
interpreters. How directly those contextualizations
map onto current circumstances is very much a
matter of judgment by those interested in the social
and behavioral sciences today, but there is no doubt
that many would set a positive value on what a
rereading of this tradition can contribute in the
present. Indeed it is likely that most educators would
count at least a knowledge of this tradition to be
essential for any social scientist, whatever their
interests. This itself is a tribute to the wide-ranging and
as we would say today ‘interdisciplinary’ value of the
legacy left by Marx.
Marx’s major works, including the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts, The German Ideology, the
Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte, the Grundrisse, the three volumes of
Capital, and the three volumes of Theories of Surplus
Value, have all been published in numerous editions
and translations and are widely available in English.
The definitive edition of the complete works of
Marx and Engels published in their original languages
is the renewed Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (known as
MEGA). This was begun in 1975 under communist
party sponsorship and published by Dietz Verlag in
East Berlin. It is now being continued by an inter-
national consortium (IMES) based in Amsterdam
and is being published by Akademie Verlag (Berlin).
The series includes all published and unpublished
works, manuscripts, letters to and from Marx and
Engels, and third parties, and considerable biblio-
graphical and contextual background in the notes and
apparatus. Current plans are to complete the series in
approximately 122 volumes in the next decades.
A vast and scholarly selection from the Marx–Engels
materials is published in English in a set of ap-
9285
Marx, Karl (1818–83)
proximately 50 volumes, begun in 1975 and now
near completion. This is the Collected Works from
Lawrence and Wishart (London).
See also: Bourgeoisie\Middle Classes, History of;
Capitalism; Class: Social; Economics, History of;
Marxism in Contemporary Sociology; Marxism\
Leninism; Marxist Social Thought, History of;
Socialism; Socialism: Historical Aspects; Working
Classes, History of
Bibliography
Carver T 1989 Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought.
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Engels F 1980a Speech at Marx’s graveside (1883). In: Marx K,
Engels F (eds.) Collected Works in One Volume. Lawrence and
Wishart, London, pp. 429–30
Engels F 1980b [Review of] Karl Marx, A contribution to the
critique of political economy (1859). In: Marx K, Engels F
(eds.) Collected Works. Lawrence and Wishart, London, Vol.
16, pp. 465–77
Engels F 1987 Anti-Du$ hring. In: Marx K, Engels F (eds.)
Collected Works. Lawrence and Wishart, London, Vol. 25,
pp. 5–309
Engels F 1992 Letter to Eduard Bernstein, 2–3 November 1882.
In: Marx K, Engels F (eds.) Collected Works. Lawrence and
Wishart, London, Vol. 46, pp. 353–8
Gamble A, Marsh D, Tant T (eds.) 1999 Marxism and Social
Science. Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK
Lenin V I 1964 Karl Marx: A brief biographical sketch with an
exposition of Marxism (1918). In: Lenin V I (ed.) Collected
Works, 4th edn. Foreign Languages Publishing House,
Moscow, Vol. 21, pp. 43–91
McLellan D 1973 Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. Macmillan,
London
Marx K, Engels F 1976 Communist Manifesto. In: Marx K,
Engels F (eds.) Collected Works. Lawrence and Wishart,
London, Vol. 6, pp. 477–519
Ruben D-H 1979 Marxism and Materialism, new & rev. edn.,
Harvester Press, Brighton, UK
T. Carver
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Marxian Economic Thought
Marxian economic thought encompasses the originary
doctrines put forward by Karl Marx together with all
the developments and controversies concerning them
which have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.
The core of the Marxian ‘critique of political eco-
nomy,’ and its differentia specifica from other currents
in economics, may however be encapsulated in a few
sentences. The chief and almost exclusive object of
analysis is capital understood as a social relation of
production, where exploitation occurs within a mon-
9286
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
etary commodity-economy. The theoretical instru-
ment employed by Marx to show the link between
money and exploitation as well as the endogeneity of
crises is the theory that value has its exclusive source
in abstract labor as activity—namely, the living labor
of the wage workers.
1. Capital as a Social Relation of Production
According to Marx, the capitalist social relation may
be defined as the historical situation where the ‘ob-
jective’ conditions of production (i.e., the means of
production, including original resources other than
labor) are privately owned by one section of society,
the capitalist class, to the exclusion of the other, the
working class. Separated from the material conditions
of labor and hence unable independently to produce
their own means of subsistence, workers are compelled
to sell to capitalist firms the only thing they own, the
‘subjective’ condition of production (i.e., their labor
power), against a money wage to be spent in buying
wage goods. Labor power is the capacity for labor: it is
the mental and physical capabilities set in motion to
do useful work, producing use values of any kind, and
it is inseparable from the living body of human beings.
The labor contract between the capitalists and the
wage workers presupposes that the latter are juridi-
cially free subjects (unlike slaves or serfs), and hence
that they put their labor power at the disposal of the
former only for a limited period of time. The owners of
the means of production, the ‘industrial capitalists,’
need an initial finance from the owners of money, the
‘money capitalists,’ not only to buy the means of
production among themselves (which, from the point
of view of the capitalist class as a whole, amounts to a
purely ‘internal’ transaction), but also and primarily
to buy workers’ labor power (which, from the same
point of view, is its only ‘external’ purchase). The
commodity output belongs to the industrial capitalists,
who sell it to ‘merchant-capitalists’ who, in turn,
realize it on the market.
Marx assumes that industrial capitalists initially
have at their disposal the money they need, and that
they sell the output on the market without intermedia-
tion (for a classic survey of Marxian economics, see
Sweezy 1970; for more recent perspectives, Harvey
1999, Foley 1986). The capitalist process in a given
production period may be summarized in the fol-
lowing terms. The first purchase on the so-called labor
market is the opening act, and it enables capitalist
entrepreneurs to set production going. Firms look
forward to selling the commodity product on the
output market against money. The receipts must at
least cover the initial advance, thereby closing the
circuit. Two kinds of monetary circulation are in-
volved here. Wage workers sell commodities, C
(which, in this case, cannot but be their own labor
power) against money, M, in order to obtain different
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7