Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, in the Rhineland province of Prussia, Germany. His radical views got him exiled from Germany, France and Austria, and he spent most of his productive years in Britain, where he died. With his friend Friedrich Engels he wrote the *Communist Manifesto (1848); his major work is Capital* (Vol. I, 1867). He studied philosophy but was a social thinker who wanted to end oppression and exploitation through 'scientific socialism'.

Stages of history. Marx argued that society progressed through primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism, and that capitalism would give way to socialism.

Alienation in capitalism works at several levels:

• humans are more alienated from nature than ever;
• from each other, as capitalism breaks up collective life and relationships become market-mediated;
• from the fruits of their labour, since workers do not own what they produce, and from the work process, which management controls (unlike a skilled craftsman);
• and finally from themselves: freer than before, yet less in control of their lives.
• Even so, Marx saw capitalism as a necessary and progressive stage, creating the conditions for a future free of exploitation and poverty. The working class would unite and overthrow it through revolution.

Mode of production: a broad system of production that defines a whole historical era. Think of it as a building:

• The base (economic base) is made of productive forces (means of production: land, labour, technology, energy sources such as coal or electricity) and production relations (economic relationships and forms of organising labour, which are also property relations: who owns or controls the means of production). In primitive communism, for example, the forces were mainly nature and simple stone tools, and property was held in common.
• The superstructure, built on the base, includes religion, art, law, literature, ideas and beliefs.
• Marx argued that material life shapes ideas, not the other way round: how people earn their living shapes how they think. This went against the common belief of his time that ideas shape the world.

Class struggle. For Marx, the most important way of grouping people is by their position in the production process, not by religion, language or nationality. People in the same position share interests, and eventually form a class.

• Capitalism created the working class: serfs and small peasants thrown off the land crowded into cities and were forced into factories, a large new group with no property who must sell their labour for wages. The bourgeoisie (capitalists) own the means of production.
• The Manifesto opens: 'The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.' Freeman and slave, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman: oppressor and oppressed in a fight now hidden, now open.
• But opposed classes do not automatically fight. They must become class conscious, aware of their own and their rivals' interests, usually through political mobilisation. Then conflict can lead to revolution, the overthrow of a ruling class.
• Dominant ideology complicates this: ruling classes promote a way of seeing the world that justifies their rule, for instance telling the poor they are poor because of 'fate' or past deeds rather than exploitation. Such ideologies can be challenged by rival worldviews.
• Example (new): a delivery rider and the owner of the delivery app both 'work in delivery', but the owner controls the platform and profits, while the rider sells only labour; in Marx's terms they belong to different classes.