Karl Marx Notes

economic conditions gradually improved for most workers in capitalist societies.

Contrary to Karl Marx's predictions,

a group of students who studied the German philosopher, Georg Hegel.

Karl Marx joined

a hotbed of radical thinking.

Paris was

worker living conditions were awful in English industrial cities such as Manchester. Entire families crowded into single-room apartments. Dirt, garbage, sewage, industrial wastes, foul air, and polluted water poisoned the environment. In the English industrial cities, 25 percent of all children under age 5 died of disease and malnutrition.

Up to about the 1880s,

the freedom of capitalists to operate their businesses as they saw fit with little interference from government.

Adam Smith called for

Friedrich Engels assembled Marx's notes and published volumes two and three of Capital.

After Karl Marx's death in London on March 14, 1883,

workers had no say in what their wages or working conditions would be. The typical workday was 12 hours not counting meal times. Children under 10 commonly worked in the factories and coal mines.

During the early years of industrialization in England,

after many delays, distractions, and health problems, Marx finally published the first volume of Capital, a major analysis of capitalism and his most important work.

In 1867,

Karl Marx described the government during the "socialist phase" of the revolution as "the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." But he stated that this dictatorship would act in the best interests of the workers and would gradually disappear.

In an 1875 essay,

Karl Marx wrote that the history of society "is the history of class struggles." Marx attempted to show that throughout history one economic class always oppressed another: "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman." But eventually the downtrodden class rose up, overthrew its master, and created an entirely new society.

In the Communist Manifesto,

on the German philosopher Georg Hegel's philosophy to explain how class struggle in history leads to a final, perfect society.

Karl Marx built

major reforms like the expansion of the right to vote, laws abolishing child labor, social security, and the right of workers to join unions.

Karl Marx failed to anticipate

a materialist, meaning he believed economics shaped history.

Karl Marx was

were born Jews, although his father converted to Christianity.

Karl Marx's parents

"Everything should be doubted."

What was Karl Marx's favorite motto?

Karl Marx came to live in England at the peak of its Industrial Revolution. He had a far different vision than Adam Smith. He focused on the exploited and impoverished industrial workers.

A German philosopher,

the value of a product is based on the labor used to manufacture it. Karl Marx pointed out that workers' wages fell far short of the price of the products they made. This was because the capitalists made a profit on what they sold. Marx called the profit "surplus value" and thought that it exploited the workers. Marx said that capitalists had alienated the worker from the results of his labor, forcing him to become "enslaved by the machine." This exploitation, argued Marx, would soon bring about a new class struggle that would end with the "violent overthrow" of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.

According to Karl Marx,

Wealth of Nations in 1776, the year the American Revolution began, which was the first complete description of a new economic system called capitalism.

Adam Smith wrote

called capitalists, gained more political power, the English Parliament repealed worker protection laws going back to the time of Queen Elizabeth I. New legislation made worker attempts to form labor unions illegal under criminal conspiracy laws.

As the new industrial owners,

landowners had dominated the old era. They gradually lost power. A new class of business people--merchants, bankers, and industrialists--rose to power.

Before the Industrial Revolution,

worker uprisings had broken out in Germany and several other European countries. Marx and Engels moved to Germany where they wrote articles, attacking the government. By 1849, however, the European governments had crushed all the revolts. Marx concluded that the revolts had been premature.

By the time Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848,

"...even in the condition of society most favorable to the worker, the inevitable result for the worker is overwork and premature death, decline to a mere machine, a bond servant of capital, which piles up dangerously over-against him, more competition, and for a section of the workers starvation or beggary."

Excerpt from Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (page 31):

a report on the dreadful conditions of the working class in England

Friedrich Engels published

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels joined a small radical workers' group and persuaded the members to name it the Communist League.

In Brussels,

the industrial capitalists and others using private property to make profits made up the oppressive class of his time. Marx called this class the bourgeoisie, which used its wealth and control over government to exploit the industrial working class. Marx named this class the proletariat.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote that

the Industrial Revolution began in England. Powered machines and factory time schedules replaced the natural rhythms of farm life. Men, women, and children labored at repetitive mechanical tasks, making goods that they did not own. For the first time, masses of people depended entirely on money wages to survive.

In the late 1700s,

communists as those who best understood the class struggle. They would unify the proletariat, lead it in the revolution, and take control of the government.

Karl Marx described

the study of economics in Paris. He reached the conclusion that the new industrial workers labored for wages that barely kept them alive while creating enormous wealth for their capitalist employers.

Karl Marx dived into

"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world unite!"

Karl Marx ended the Communist Manifesto with these rousing words:

that once the proletariat had taken control of all capitalist property, wealth would flow more abundantly for the benefit of all. Then in the "higher phase of communist society," individuals would finally be free to develop their abilities and talents to the fullest. Karl Marx put it this way: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Karl Marx expected

When the proletariat finally controlled economic production, Karl Marx declared that all classes would disappear and class struggles would end. In this "communist phase," there would no longer be a need for a government.

Karl Marx on the "communist phase" of the revolution:

During what Karl Marx called the "socialist phase" of the revolution, the new proletarian government would confiscate all capitalist private property like factories, mines, farms, and other businesses. The government would then operate these enterprises for the benefit of the workers.

Karl Marx on the "socialist phase" of the revolution:

in 1818 in a part of Germany then called Prussia.

Karl Marx was born

about religion all of his life.

Karl Marx was indifferent

that every important idea (thesis) produced another idea that was its opposite (antithesis). The resulting conflict or struggle between the thesis and its antithesis resulted in an entirely new idea (synthesis).

The German philosopher Georg Hegel taught

an idealist, meaning he believed ideas shaped history.

The German philosopher Georg Hegel was

"In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore, mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production—antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society."

Excerpt from Karl Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

Excerpt from Karl Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (page 3):

"The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labor produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity-and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally. This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces-labor's product-confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor's realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labor appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation."

Excerpt from Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (108):

"On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; that finally the distinction between capitalist and land-rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory-worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes-the property-owners and the propertyless workers."

Excerpt from Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (page 105):

"Thus in a declining state of society-increasing misery of the worker; in an advancing state-misery with complications; and in a fully developed state of society-static misery. Since, however, according to Smith, a society is not happy, of which the greater part suffers-yet even the wealthiest state of society leads to this suffering of the majority-and since the economic system (and in general a society based on private interest) leads to this wealthiest condition, it follows that the goal of the economic system is the unhappiness of society."

Excerpt from Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (page 33):

"Whilst the division of labor raises the productive power of labor and increases the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker and reduces him to a machine. Whilst labor brings about the accumulation of capital and with this the increasing prosperity of society, it renders the worker ever more dependent on the capitalist, leads him into competition of a new intensity, and drives him into the headlong rush of over-production, with its subsequent corresponding slump."

Excerpt from Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (page 35):

"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

Excerpt from the "Critique of the Gotha Program" by Karl Marx (page 12):

"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

Excerpt from the "Critique of the Gotha Program" by Karl Marx (page 23):

Karl Marx wrote that the worker was alienated, or separated, from the fruits of his own labor. To correct this injustice and achieve true freedom, Karl Marx said the workers must first overthrow the capitalist system of private property. The workers would then replace capitalism with a communist economic system, in which they would own property in common and share the wealth they produced.

In 1844,

Karl Marx published his last writing, a short preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto. Russia was mainly a rural peasant society with little industrial development. Thus, Karl Marx had ignored Russia as lagging far behind in the march toward revolution. He now, however, admitted that the Russian peasants were at "the starting-point for a communist development."

In 1882,

Karl Marx pointed out numerous contributions that capitalism had made to economic progress, especially in the area of technology. But he wrote that capitalism was doomed. He predicted that as capitalism developed, a small number of powerful monopolies would drive many enterprises out of business. To successfully compete against one another, these "cut throat" monopolies would reduce worker wages. Finally, a class struggle between the workers and the capitalists would bring on a revolution, replacing capitalism with communism.

In Capital,

"A specter is haunting Europe--the specter of Communism." This is how Marx began the Communist Manifesto. He went on to describe what he believed to be a scientific and economic explanation of how history had progressed in the past and would unfold in the future.

Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto:

pointed to the economic ideas of Adam Smith to support their vision of freedom. In 1776, the year the American Revolution began, Adam Smith had written Wealth of Nations, the first complete description of a new economic system called capitalism. Smith had called for the freedom of capitalists to operate their businesses as they saw fit with little interference from government.

The increasingly powerful capitalists

When Karl Marx called "religion the opium of the people," he meant that religion acts like a narcotic, easing the pain of the poor and oppressed in a "heartless world." But like a narcotic, religion failed to cure the oppression.

What did Karl Marx mean when he called "religion the opium of the people"?

Karl Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, also a German. Friedrich Engels' father owned a share in several textile mills in Manchester, England. Although Engels worked in the family business, he soon began to publish works critical of capitalists.

While in Paris,