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Unit 11: Karl Marx: His Life and Works, Materialism and Dialectical Materialism

Some of the ideas that the early Socialists articulated were a centrally planned economy, equal Notes
income, production for use and common good, and not for profit, common ownership of property,
and moral indignation at inequities and injustices between the possessing and the non-propertied
classes. They looked down on capitalism as a wasteful and inefficient system, for it led to poverty,
unemployment and squalor. Capitalism was evil because it produced a class-divided society. It
made human beings selfish, acquisitive and ruthlessly competitive, making them lose their natural
instincts of compassion, fellow-feeling and solidarity. Their critique of capitalism was both practical
and ethical. Many, in fact nearly all these ideas were reiterated by Marx, except that he proved
that the destruction of capitalism was inevitable because of certain consequences it produced. The
early Socialists, on the contrary, sought to bring about the desired changes by appealing to the
feelings of human brotherhood and solidarity. They could not visualize the mechanisms of changing
capitalism, as they wrote at a time when it was too early to foresee the course of development of
capitalism. Their credit lay in the fact that they did not harp on a golden age of the past of a pre-
capitalist period, but were aware of the fact that there was no going back in history. Instead, they
chose to humanize contemporary reality.

Marx was the first spokesman for socialism to remove the earlier Utopian fantasies
and eccentricities, the first to present the socialist ideal not as a mere pleasing dream
but as a historically realizable goal, indeed as a goal that history had brought to the
very threshold of possibility.

Marx inherited and integrated three legacies—German philosophy, French political thought and
English economics—in his theoretical construct. From the German intellectual tradition, he borrowed
the Hegelian method of dialectics and applied it to the material world. From the French
Revolutionary tradition, he accepted the idea that apocalyptic change motivated by a “messianic”
idea was not only desirable, but also feasible. He applied his method with a view to bringing
about large-scale changes within the industrialized capitalist economy, of which England was the
classic model in the nineteenth century. He used the writings of the English classical economists
to understand the dynamics of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution . He believed that historical
movement took place according to laws that were similar to the ones found in the natural world.
In the preface to the Capital (1861-1879), he spoke of the “natural laws of capitalist production”.
England, being the most developed society in his time, was the subject of his study. The purpose
of his focus was to lay down, the road other societies would travel.
Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social
antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these
laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The
country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed, the image of its own
future.
The emphasis on action and revolution made Marx a philosopher, a social scientist and a
revolutionary. Though he used Hegelian concepts, he gave them very different meanings. The
critique of Hegelian idealism and the materialist interpretation of history—the core of Marxism—
crystallized in the writings of Marx in the early part of his adult life. His early writings (the poems
written to Jenny von Westphalen and his doctoral thesis entitled The Difference between the
Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature [1839-1841]) contained the genesis of Marxist theory.
He acknowledged Hegel to be a “Giant thinker”, but his poems and doctoral thesis showed his
dissatisfaction with German (and, in particular, Hegelian) idealism, though in many respects he
continued with Hegelian philosophy.

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