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Karl Marx The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19 th century. Although scholars largely ignored him in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be Marxist. Karl Marx be called both harmful to mankind and a contributor to the good of mankind. (Microsoft Encarta) Marx was a good person - he was fond of his family, deeply in love with his wife, Jenny, and profoundly concerned about poverty and social injustice. The Good Marx wept bitterly when his children died and always carried a daguerreotype of his father in his pocket.
However, inside the Good Marx lurked the Bad Marx waiting to break free. A young Russian who met Marx in 1846, when he was 28 years old, caught his other side: Marx was the type of man who is made up of energy, will and unshakable conviction, wrote Pavel Annenkov, as quoted in the biography. He always spoke in imperative words that would brook no contradiction and were made all the sharper by the almost painful impression of the tone which ran through everything he said. (Goode) Marx's 20 th-century legacy has been Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro - and 100 million dead, according to the Paris-based Center for the Study of the History and Sociology of Communism. Yet, it is probably not fair for Marx to be blamed for what happened to his ideas after his death. Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag (Arendt) and all the other violence of communist governments. It may very well be true, but it is still difficult to justify Marx for crimes committed in his name.
Marx longed for revolution with the passion of a zealot, and he devoted his life and mind towards accomplishing that. Stalin and Mao shared that zealousness and devotion. Marxism has done as much to hide and obliterate the actual teachings of Marx as it has to propagate them. If one wants to find out who Marx was, what he thought, and how he stands in the tradition of political thought, Marxism all too easily appears mainly as a discomfort. Through Marxism, Marx himself has been praised or blamed for many things of which he was entirely innocent. For instance, for decades he was highly esteemed, or deeply resented, as the inventor of class struggle, of which he was not only not the inventor (facts are not invented), but not even the discoverer.
The political relevance of class struggle could hardly be more emphatically stated, than by basing two distinct forms of government on it. Nor can Marx be credited with having elevated this political and economic fact into the realm of history. For such elevation had been current ever since Hegel encountered Napoleon Bonaparte, seeing in him the world spirit on horseback. (Arendt) A serious examination of Marx himself, as opposed to the cursory dismissal of his name and the often unconscious retention of the consequences of his teaching, is therefore somehow dangerous in two respects: it cannot but question certain trends in the social sciences that are Marxist in all but name and the depth of Marx's own thought; and it must necessarily examine the real questions and perplexities of our own tradition with which Marx himself dealt and struggled. It has become fashionable during the last few years to assume an unbroken line between Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, thereby accusing Marx of being the father of totalitarian domination. Very few of those who yield to this line of argument seem to be aware that to accuse Marx of totalitarianism amounts to accusing the Western tradition itself of necessarily ending in the monstrosity of this novel form of government. Whoever touches Marx touches the tradition of Western thought; thus the conservatives on which many of our new critics of Marx pride themselves is usually as great a self-misunderstanding as the revolutionary zeal of the ordinary Marxist.
The few critics of Marx who are aware of the roots of Marx's thought therefore have attempted to construe a special trend in the tradition, an occidental heresy that nowadays is sometimes called Gnosticism, in recollection of the oldest heresies of Catholic Christianity. Yet this attempt to limit the destructiveness of totalitarianism by the consequent interpretation that it has grown directly from such a trend in the Western tradition is doomed to failure. Marx's thought cannot be limited to immanentism, as if everything could be set right again if only we would leave utopia to the next world and not assume that everything on earth can be measured and judged by earthly yardsticks. For Marx's roots go far deeper in the tradition than even he himself knew. I think it can be shown that the line from Aristotle to Marx shows both fewer and far less decisive breaks than the line from Marx to Stalin. The basic self-contradiction in which Marx's whole work, from the early writings to the third volume of Capital, is this insistence on freedom.
It can be expressed in various ways, such as that he needed violence to abolish violence, that the goal of history is to end history, that labor is the only productive activity of man but that the development of mans productive forces will eventually lead to the abolition of labor, etc. For when Marx stated that labor is the most important activity of man, he was saying in terms of the tradition that not freedom but necessity is what makes man human. The examination of Marx, in other words, cannot but be an examination of traditional thought insofar as it is applicable to the modern world, a world whose presence can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution on the one hand, and to the political revolutions of the eighteenth century on the other. The modern age presented modern man with two main problems, independent of all political events in the narrow sense of the word: the problems of labor and history. The significance of Marx's thought lies neither in his economic theories nor in its revolutionary content, but in the stubbornness with which he clung to these two chief new perplexities. Works cited: Arendt, Hannah; Karl Marx.
Social Research Journal; Summer, 2002 Goode, Steven; KARL MARX: A LIFE; Insight Magazine, August 7, 2000 Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, Karl Marx, Microsoft Corporation, 2000
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Research essay sample on Karl Marx Marx Thought
