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Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany
– March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an
influential Prussia| German philosopher, political
economy|political economist, and revolutionary
organizer of the International Workingmen's
Association. Marx wrote prolificly but is best
known for two books in particular, Das Kapital and
The Communist Manifesto (the latter with Friedrich
Engels), which laid the foundations of Marxism
which in turn heavily influenced modern Communism.
 While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he
is most famous for his analysis of history in
terms of class struggles, summed up in the famous
opening line of the introduction to the Communist
Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggle| class
struggle."

== Biography ==
=== Early life ===

Karl Marx was born into a progressive Jewish
family in Prussian Trier, Germany. His father
Herschel, descending from a long line of rabbis,
was a lawyer and his brother Samuel was—like
many of his ancestors—chief rabbi of Trier.
In 1817, before Karl's birth, Heinrich Marx
converted to the Prussian state religion of
Lutheran church|Lutheranism to keep his position
as a lawyer, which he had gained under the
Napoleonic regime. The Marx family was very
liberalism|liberal and the Marx household hosted
many visiting intellectuals and artists during
Karl's early life. 

==== Education ====
Marx received good marks in gymnasium
(school)|gymnasium, the Prussian secondary
education school. His senior thesis, which
anticipated his later development of a social
analysis of religion, was a treatise entitled
"Religion: The Glue That Binds Society Together",
for which he won a prize.


In 1833 Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn to
study law, at his father's behest. He joined the
Trier Tavern Club and at one point served as its
president; his grades suffered as he spent most of
his time singing songs in beer halls (McLellen
17). The following year, his father forced him
transfer to the far more serious and academically
oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin
(now known as the Humboldt University of
Berlin|Humboldt University).

==== Marx and Young Hegelians ====
In Berlin, Marx's interests turned to philosophy,
much to his father's dismay, and he joined the
circle of students and young professors known as
the "Young Hegelians", led by Bruno Bauer. Some
members of this circle drew an analogy between
post-Aristotle|Aristotelian philosophy and
post-Hegelian philosophy. Another Young Hegelian,
Max Stirner, applied Hegelian criticism and argued
that stopping anywhere short of
nihilism|nihilistic egoism was mysticism. His
views were not accepted by most of his colleagues,
and Karl Marx responded in parts of Die Deutsche
Ideologie (The German Ideology), but decided not
to publish it. Nevertheless Stirner's book was the
main reason Marx abandoned the Feuerbachian view
and developed the basic concept of historical
materialism. 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Georg Hegel died in
1831, and during his lifetime was an extremely
influential figure at
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität and in German
academia in general. The Hegelian establishment
(known as the Right Hegelians) in place at
Friedrich-Wilhelms maintained that the series of
historical dialectics had been completed, and that
Prussian society as it existed was the culmination
of all social development to date, with an
extensive civil service system, good universities,
industrialization, and high employment. The Young
Hegelians with whom Marx was associated believed
that there were still further dialectical changes
to come, and that the Prussian society of the time
was far from perfect as it still contained some
pockets of poverty, government sponsored
censorship and discrimination against
non-Lutherans.

Marx was told not to submit his doctoral
dissertation at the
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, as it would
certainly be poorly received there due to his
reputation as a Young Hegelian radical. Marx
instead submitted his dissertation, which compared
the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus, to
the University of Jena in 1840, where it was
accepted.

=== Career ===
When his mentor Bruno Bauer was dismissed from the
philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned
philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the
Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne newspaper.
After the newspaper was shut in 1843, in part due
to Marx's conflicts with government censors, Marx
returned to philosophy, turned to political
activism, and made his living as a freelance
journalism|freelance journalist. Marx soon moved,
however, something he would do often as a result
of his views.

Marx first moved to France, where he re-evaluated
his relationship with Bauer and the Young
Hegelians, and wrote On the Jewish Question,
mostly a critique of current notions of civil
rights and political emancipation. It was in Paris
that he met and began working with his life-long
collaborator Friedrich Engels, who called Marx's
attention to the situation of the working class
and guided Marx's interest in economics. After he
was forced to leave Paris for his writings, he and
Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium. 


There they co-wrote The German Ideology, a
critique of the philosophy of Hegel and the Young
Hegelians. Marx next wrote The Poverty of
Philosophy (1847), a critique of French socialist
thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx
and Engels' most famous work, The Communist
Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848,
which was commissioned by the Communist League
(formerly, the League of the Just), an
organization of German émigrés whom Marx had
coveted in London. 

That year Europe experienced revolutionary
upheaval; a working-class movement seized power
from King Louis Philippe in France and invited
Marx to return to Paris. When this government
collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and
restarted the Rheinische Zeitung, only to be
swiftly expelled again. Marx's final move was to
London. In 1852 Marx wrote his famous pamphlet The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which
he analyzed Napoleon III of France | Napoleon
III's takeover of France. From 1852 to 1861, while
in London, Marx contributed to Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune as its European correspondent.

=== First International and Gladstone Quote ===   

In 1863, Chancellor of the Exchequer William Ewart
Gladstone gave a budget speech to Parliament in
which he commented on the increase in the United
Kingdom's national wealth, and added (according to
the report of the speech in The Times), "I should
look almost with apprehension and with pain upon
this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power
if it were my belief that it was confined to the
class who are in easy circumstances. This takes no
cognizance at all of the condition of the laboring
population. The augmentation I have described and
which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns,
is an augmentation entirely confined to classes
possessed of property." But, in the semi-official
version published in Hansard, Gladstone deleted
the final sentence (editing the Hansard version
was a common practice among Members of
Parliament).    
   
In 1864 Marx organized the International
Workingmen's Association, later called the First
International, as a base for continued political
activism. In his inaugural address, he purported
to quote Gladstone's speech, to the effect that,
"This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
power is entirely confined to classes of
property." He repeated the citation in Volume 1 of
Capital. The discrepancy between Marx's quote and
the Hansard version of the speech (which was
well-known) was soon employed in an attempt to
discredit the International. Marx attempted to
rebut the accusations of dishonesty, but the
allegation continued to resurface. Marx later gave
as his source the newspaper The Morning Star.   

    
Engels devoted a good deal of attention to the
affair in the preface to the fourth edition of
Capital — which, likewise, did not put the
matter to rest. Engels claimed that it was not The
Morning Star but The Times that Marx was
following. Indeed, critics of Marxism such as the
journalist Paul Johnson (journalist)|Paul Johnson
continue to invoke Marx's supposed misquotation as
evidence of general dishonesty. One can find a
straightforward unravelling of this dispute in
David A. Felix's work, Marx As Politician (London,
1983).    
   
The International survived the controversy,
however, collapsing in 1872 in part because of the
fall of the Paris Commune, and in part because
many members turned to Mikhail Bakunin's
anarchism. In London throughout this period, Marx
also dedicated himself to the historical and
theoretical research behind Das Kapital (Capital:
A Critique of Political Economy). Marx published
the first volume in 1867. The remaining two
volumes of Capital were never completed by Marx,
but were reconstructed by Engels from extensive
notes and drafts, and published posthumously.

=== Marital life ===
Marx's wife, Jenny von Westphalen (Jenny Marx
after she became married), came from an
aristocratic background. Their engagement was
secret at first, and for several years it was
opposed by both families. Jenny's uncle was Lion
Philips, father of the brothers Gerard
Philips|Gerard and Anton Philips|Anton who founded
the famous Philips company in 1891. The Marxes had
many children, several of whom died young —
their daughter Eleanor Marx|Eleanor (1855-1898),
born in London, was also a committed socialist and
helped edit her father's works. Jenny Marx died
quickly in December 1881.

=== Later Life ===

Throughout the later period of Marx's life he was
generally impoverished and depended on financial
contributions from Engels (Marx's close friend, a
theorist, and committed communist) to help with
his family's living expenses and debts.

Marx died in London in the year 1883, and is
buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. The message
carved on Marx's tombstone - a monument built in
1954 by the Communist Party of Great
Britain|British Communist Party - is: "Workers of
all lands, unite". Marx's original tomb was humbly
adorned.

=== Influences on Marx's thought ===
Marx's thought was strongly influenced by: 

*the dialectical historicism of Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel
*the classical political economy of Adam Smith and
David Ricardo. 
*French socialist and sociological thought.

Marx believed that he could study history and
society scientifically and discern tendencies of
history and the resulting outcome of social
conflicts. Some followers of Marx concluded,
therefore, that a communist revolution is
inevitable. However, Marx famously asserted that
"philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point however is to change it",
and he clearly dedicated himself to trying to
alter the world. Consequently, most followers of
Marx are not fatalists, but activists who believe
that revolutionaries must organize social change.


Marx's view of history, which came to be called
Historical materialism|Materialist Interpretation
of History and which was developed further as the
philosophy of dialectical materialism) is
certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality
(and history) should be viewed
dialectic|dialectically, through a clash of
opposing forces. Hegel believed that the direction
of human history is characterized in the movement
from the fragmentary toward the complete and the
real (which was also a movement towards greater
and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel
explained, this progressive unfolding of the
Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion
but at other times requires discontinuous,
revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals
against existing status quo. While Marx accepted
this broad conception of history, Hegel was an
idealism|idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite
dialectics in materialism|materialist terms. He
wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of
reality on its head, and that it was necessary to
set it upon its feet.

Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist
dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was
greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The
Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God
is really a creation of man and that the qualities
people attribute to God are really qualities of
humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the
material world that is real and that our ideas of
it are consequences, not causes, of the world.
Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx
distinguished between appearances and reality. But
he did not believe that the material world hides
from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the
contrary, he thought that historically and
socially specific ideology|ideologies prevented
people from seeing the material conditions of
their lives clearly. 

The other important contribution to Marx's
revision of Hegelianism was Engels' book, The
Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,
which led Marx to conceive of the historical
dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see
the modern working class as the most progressive
force for revolution.

===Marx's philosophy===
The notion of labour is fundamental in Marx's
thought. Basically, Marx argued that it is human
nature to transform nature, and he calls this
process of transformation "labour" and the
capacity to transform nature labour-power|labour
power. For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a
physical activity, but it is intimately tied to
the human mind and human imagination:
 
:A spider conducts operations that resemble those
of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an
architect in the construction of her cells. But
what distinguishes the worst architect from the
best of bees is this, that the architect raises
his structure in imagination before he erects it
in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1)

Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic and,
with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying
invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express
their views by contrasting “nature”
with “history”. Sometimes they use the
phrase “existence precedes
consciousness”. The point, in either case,
is that who a person is, is determined by where
and when he is — social context takes
precedence over innate behavior; or, in other
words, the main feature of human nature is
adaptability.

Marx did not believe that all people worked the
same way, or that how one works is entirely
personal and individual. Instead, he argued that
work is a social activity and that the conditions
and forms under and through which people work are
socially determined and change over time.

Marx's analysis of history is based on his
distinction between the means of production|means
/ forces of production, literally those things,
such as land, natural resources, and technology,
that are necessary for the production of material
goods, and the relations of production, in other
words, the social and technical relationships
people enter into as they acquire and use the
means of production. Together these comprise the
mode of production; Marx observed that within any
given society the mode of production changes, and
that European societies had progressed from a
feudalism |feudal mode of production to a
capitalism|capitalist mode of production. In
general, Marx believed that the means of
production change more rapidly than the relations
of production (for example, we develop a new
technology, such as the Internet, and only later
do we develop laws to regulate that technology).
For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and
(social) superstructure is a major source of
social disruption and conflict.

Marx understood the "social relations of
production" to comprise not only relations among
individuals, but between or among groups of
people, or class (social)|classes. As a scientist
and materialist, Marx did not understand classes
as purely subjective (in other words, groups of
people who consciously identified with one
another). He sought to define classes in terms of
objective criteria, such as their access to
resources.  For Marx, different classes have
divergent interests, which is another source of
social disruption and conflict.

Marx was especially concerned with how people
relate to that most fundamental resource of all,
their own labour-power. Marx wrote extensively
about this in terms of the problem of alienation.
As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian
notion of alienation but developed a more
materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility
that one may give up ownership of one's own labour
— one's capacity to transform the world
— is tantamount to being alienated from
one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx
described this loss in terms of commodity
fetishism, in which people come to believe that it
is the very things that they produce that are
powerful, and the sources of power and creativity,
rather than people themselves. He argued that when
this happens, people begin to mediate all their
relationships among themselves and with others
through commodities.

Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels
called false consciousness, which is closely
related to the understanding of ideology. By
ideology they meant ideas that reflect the
interests of a particular class at a particular
time in history, but which are presented as
universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was
not only that such beliefs are at best
half-truths; they serve an important political
function. Put another way, the control that one
class exercises over the means of production
includes not only the production of food or
manufactured goods; it includes the production of
ideas as well (this provides one possible
explanation for why members of a subordinate class
may hold ideas contrary to their own interests).
Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also
reveal in coded form some truth about political
relations. For example, although the belief that
the things people produce are actually more
productive than the people who produced them is
literally absurd, it does reflect the fact
(according to Marx and Engels) that people under
capitalism are alienated from their own
labour-power. Another example of this sort of
analysis is Marx's understanding of religion,
summed up in a passage from the Contribution to
the Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right:" 
: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.
Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that
the primary social function of religion was to
promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social
function as a way of expressing and coping with
social inequality, thereby maintaining the status
quo.

=== Critique of capitalism ===
Marx argued that this alienation of human work
(and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely
the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to
capitalism, markets existed in Europe where
producers and merchants bought and sold
commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode
of production developed in Europe when labor
itself became a commodity — when peasants
became free to sell their own labor-power, and
needed to do so because they no longer possessed
their own land or tools necessary to produce.
People sell their labor-power when they accept
compensation in return for whatever work they do
in a given period of time (in other words, they
are not selling the product of their labor, but
their capacity to work). In return for selling
their labor power they receive money, which allows
them to survive. Those who must sell their labor
power to live are "proletarians." The person who
buys the labor power, generally someone who does
own the land and technology to produce, is a
"capitalist" or "bourgeois." (Marx considered this
an objective description of capitalism, distinct
from any one of a variety of ideological claims of
or about capitalism). The proletarians inevitably
outnumber the capitalists.

Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from
merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one
place and sell them in another; more precisely,
they buy things in one market and sell them in
another. Since the laws of supply and demand
operate within given markets, there is often a
difference between the price of a commodity in one
market and another. Merchants, then, practice
arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference
between these two markets. According to Marx,
capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of
the difference between the labor market and the
market for whatever commodity is produced by the
capitalist. Marx observed that in practically
every successful industry input unit-costs are
lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the
difference "surplus value" and argued that this
surplus value had its source in surplus labour. 

The capitalist mode of production is capable of
tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and
has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new
technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class
to be the most revolutionary in history, because
it constantly revolutionized the means of
production. But Marx argued that capitalism was
prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over
time, capitalists would invest more and more in
new technologies, and less and less in labor.
Since Marx believed that surplus value
appropriated from labor is the source of profits,
he concluded that the rate of profit would fall
even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit
falls below a certain point, the result would be a
recession or depression in which certain sectors
of the economy would collapse. Marx understood
that during such a crisis the price of labor would
also fall, and eventually make possible the
investment in new technologies and the growth of
new sectors of the economy. 

Marx believed that this business cycles | cycle of
growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated
by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he
believed that the long-term consequence of this
process was necessarily the enrichment and
empowerment of the capitalist class and the
impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed
that were the proletariat to seize the means of
production, they would encourage social relations
that would benefit everyone equally, and a system
of production less vulnerable to periodic crises.
In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation
of this problem was impracticable, and that a
massive, well-organized and violent revolution was
required by necessity. Finally, he theorized that
to maintain the socialist system, a dictatorship
of the proletariat - a period where the needs of
the working-class will be the common deciding
factor, not that of capital - must be established
and maintained.

===Critique of bourgeois democracy and of
anti-Semitism===
Some scholars have presented an alternative
reading of Marx, based on his essays On the Jewish
Question. Economist Tyler Cowen, historian Marvin
Perry, and political scientist Joshua Muravchik
have suggested that what they see as an intense
hatred for the "Jewish Class" was part of Marx's
belief that if he could convince his
contemporaries and the public to hate Jewish
capitalists, the public would eventually come to
hate non-Jewish capitalists as well. 

Most scholars reject this claim for two reasons:
first, it is based on two short essays written in
the 1840s, and ignores the bulk of Marx's analysis
of capitalism written in the following years.
Second, it distorts the argument of On the Jewish
Question, in which Marx deconstructs liberal
notions of emancipation. During the Enlightenment,
philosophers and political theorists argued that
religious authority had been oppressing human
beings, and that religion must be separated from
the functions of the state for people to be truly
free. Following the French Revolution, many people
were thus calling for the Jewish
emancipation|emancipation of the Jews. 

At the same time, many argued that Christianity is
a more enlightened and advanced religion than
Judaism. For example, Marx's former mentor, Bruno
Bauer, argued that Christians need to be
emancipated only once (from Christianity), and
Jews need to be emancipated twice — first
from Judaism (presumably, by converting to
Christianity), then from religion altogether.

Marx rejects Bauer's argument as a form of
Christian ethnocentrism, if not anti-Semitic. Marx
proceeds to turn Bauer's language, and the
rhetoric of anti-Semites, upside down to make a
more progressive argument. First, he points out
that Bruno Bauer's argument is too parochial
because it considers Christianity to be more
evolved than Judaism, and because it narrowly
defines the problem that requires emancipation to
be religion. Marx instead argues that the issue is
not religion, but capitalism. Pointing out that
anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews are fundamentally
anti-capitalist, Marx provides a theory of
anti-Semitism by suggesting that anti-Semites
scapegoat Jews for capitalism because too many
non-Jews benefit from, or are invested in
capitalism, to attack capitalism directly. 

Marx also uses this rhetoric irony|ironically to
develop his critique of bourgeois notions of
emancipation. Marx points out that the bourgeois
notion of freedom is predicated on choice (in
politics, through elections; in the economy,
through the market), but that this form of freedom
is anti-social and alienating. Although Bauer and
other liberals believe that emancipation means
freedom to choose, Marx argues that this is at
best a very narrow notion of freedom. Thus, what
Bauer believes would be the emancipation of the
Jews is for Marx actually alienation, not
emancipation. After explaining that he is not
referring to real Jews or to the Jewish religion,
Marx appropriates this anti-Semitic rhetoric
against itself (in a way that parallels his
Hegelian argument that capitalism contains the
seeds of its own destruction) by using "Judaism"
ironically as a metaphor for capitalism. In this
sense, Marx states, all Europeans are "Jewish".
This is a pun on two levels. First, if the Jews
must be emancipated, Marx is saying that all
Europeans must be emancipated. Second, if by
"Judaism" one really means "capitalism," then far
from Jews needing to be emancipated from
Christianity (as Bauer called for), Christians
need to be emancipated from Judaism (meaning,
bourgeois society). See: works by historian Hal
Draper and David McLellan. See also:
Roots_of_anti-Semitism#Karl_Marx.27s_.27On_the_Jew
ish_Question.27.|Roots of anti-Semitism: Karl
Marx's On the Jewish Question.

== Marx's influence == 
See also: Marxism


Marx and Engels'  work covers a wide range of
topics and presents a complex analysis of history
and society in terms of class relations. Followers
of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to
propose a political and economic philosophy dubbed
Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous
debates among Marxists over how to interpret
Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to
current events and conditions (and it is important
to distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx
believed"; for example, shortly before he died in
1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers'
leader Jules Guesde, and to Marx's son-in-law Paul
Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary
phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of
reformist struggles; "if that is Marxism" —
paraphrasing what Marx wrote — "then I am
not a Marxist"). Essentially, people use the word
"Marxist" to describe those who rely on Marx's
conceptual language (e.g. mode of production,
class, commodity fetishism) to understand
capitalist and other societies, or to describe
those who believe that a workers' revolution is
the only means to a communist society.

Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others
founded the "Second International
(politics)|Second International" as a base for
continued political activism. This organization
collapsed in 1914, in part because some members
turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary"
socialism, and in part because of divisions
precipitated by World War I.

World War I also led to the Russian Revolution and
the consequent ascendance of Vladimir Lenin's
leadership of the communist movement, embodied in
the "Comintern|Third International". Lenin claimed
to be both the philosophical and political heir to
Marx, and developed a political program, called
Leninism or Bolshevik|Bolshevism, which called for
revolution organized and led by a centrally
organized Communist Party. 

After Lenin's death, the Secretary-General of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph
Stalin, seized control of the Party and state
apparatus. He argued that before a world-wide
communist revolution would be possible, the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to
dedicate itself to building communism in its own
country. It was Stalin's Soviet Union and its
policies that undermined concept of Marxism in the
Western world. For many years, especially after
the Second World War during the Cold War period,
Marxism was popularly equated with communism,
which in turn was understood as an political
totalitarianism disregarding civil rights.

In 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet
Union and in 1938 founded the competing "Fourth
International." Some followers of Trotsky argued
that Stalin had created a bureaucratic state
rather than a socialist state. 

In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to
Marx, but argued that peasants and not just
workers could play a leading role in a Communist
revolution. This was a profound departure from
Marx's own view of revolution, which focused
exclusively on the urban proletariat, and which he
believed would take place in advanced industrial
societies such as France, Germany and England.
Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be
internationally known as Maoism.

In the 1920s and '1930s|30s, a group of dissident
Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research
in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor
Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a
group, these authors are often called the
Frankfurt School. Their work is known as Critical
theory (Frankfurt School)|Critical Theory, a type
of Marxist philosophy and cultural criticism
heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and
Max Weber. 

The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists,
including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key
ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendance
of Stalinism and Fascism, they had grave doubts as
to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian
class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier
Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic
determinism. While highly influential, their work
is often criticized for reducing Marxism to a
purely academic enterprise. 

Other influential non-Bolshevik Marxists at that
time include Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin,
Antonio Gramsci, and Rosa Luxemburg. Henryk
Grossman, who elaborated the mathematical basis of
Marx's 'law of capitalist breakdown', was another
contemporary. These figures, including but not
limited to the Frankfurt School, are often known
by the term Western Marxism. 

In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded
Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an
outlet for Marxist thought in the United States
independent of the Communist Party of the United
States of America|Communist Party.

In July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner of the
'Greatest Philosopher of All Time' poll by
listeners of BBC BBC Radio 4|Radio
4.http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6
903,1530250,00.html



== Contemporary criticism ==
Many proponents of capitalism have argued that
capitalism is a more effective means of generating
and redistributing wealth than socialism or
communism, and that the gulf between rich and poor
that concerned Marx and Engels was a temporary
phenomenon. Some suggest that greed and the need
to acquire capital is an inherent component of
human behavior, and is not caused by the adoption
of capitalism or any other specific economic
system (although economic cultural
anthropology|anthropologists have questioned this
assertion) and that different economic systems
reflect different social responses to this fact.
The Austrian School of economics has criticized
Marx's use of the labor theory of value. In
addition, the political repression and economic
problems of several historical socialism|socialist
states have done much to destroy Marx's reputation
in the Western countries|Western world,
particularly following the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Marx has also been criticized from the Left.
Evolutionary socialists|Evolutionary socialists
and social democrats|social democrats reject his
claim that socialism can be accomplished only
through class conflict and violent revolution.
Others argue that class is not the most
fundamental inequality in history and call
attention to patriarchy or race. However, Marxists
argue that these inequalities are linked to class
and therefore will largely cease to exist after
the formation of a classless society. Some today
question the theoretical and historical validity
of "class" as an analytic construct or as a
political actor. In this line, some question
Marx's reliance on 19th century notions that
linked science with the idea of "progress" (see
social evolution). Many observe that capitalism
has changed much since Marx's time, and that class
differences and relationships are much more
complex — citing as one example the fact
that much corporate stock in the United States is
owned by workers through pension funds.

Still others criticize Marx from the perspective
of philosophy of science. Karl Popper has
criticized Marx's theories as he believed they
were not falsifiable, which he argued would render
some particular aspects of Marx’s historical
and socio-political arguments unscientific.
Primarily, this stems from Marx's assertion that
class revolt will be part of the process in
overcoming capitalism. The argument goes that the
critic says "this will not happen" to which the
reply is "but it will." However it has been argued
that such statements show a simplistic
understanding or a deliberate misinterpretation,
because the reply has no basis in what Marx
actually said.

A common critique of Marx points out that the
increasing class antagonisms he predicted never
actually developed in the Western world following
industrialization. While socioeconomic gaps
between the bourgeoisie and proleteriat remained,
industrialization in countries such as the United
States and United Kingdom|Great Britain also saw
the rise of a middle class not inclined to violent
revolution, and of a welfare state that helped
contain any revolutionary tendencies among the
working class. While the economic devastation of
the Great Depression broadened the appeal of
Marxism in the developed world, future government
safeguards and economic recovery led to a decline
in its influence. In contrast, Marxism remained
extremely influential in feudalism|feudal and
industrially underdeveloped societies such as
Czarist Russia, where the October
Revolution|Bolshevik Revolution was successful.
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.10009,filter
.all/pub_detail.asp

Marxist political parties and movements have
significantly declined since the fall of the
Soviet Union. Critics argue that the Soviet
Union's numerous internal failings and subsequent
collapse were a direct result of the practical
failings of Marxism, but modern-day Marxists,
especially Trotskyism|Trotskyists, respond to this
by pointing out that the Soviet Union's political
system did not actually resemble true socialism at
all. Marx analyzed the world of his day and
refused to draw up plans of how a future socialist
society should be run saying he did not "write
recipes...for cook-shops of the future."  Outside
Europe and the United States, communism has
generally been superseded by anti-colonialist and
nationalism|nationalist struggles which sometimes
appeal to Marx for theoretical support.

Contemporary supporters of Marx argue most
generally that Marx was correct that human
behavior reflects determinate historical and
social conditions (and is therefore changing and
can not be understood in terms of some universal
"human nature"). More specifically, they argue his
analysis of commodities is still useful and that
alienation is still a problem.

==References==
* Stephen Jay Gould,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is
_7_108/ai_55698600/pg_1 A Darwinian Gentleman at
Marx's Funeral - E. Ray Lankester, Page 1,
http://www.findarticles.com/ Find Articles.com
(1999). (Marx's tomb)
* Daniel Little, The Scientific Marx, University
of Minnesota Press (1986), trade paperback, 244
pages, ISBN 0816615055 (Marx's work considered as
science)
* David McLellen Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
* Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution (4
volumes). Monthly Review Press.
*Boris Nicolaevski & Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl
Marx: Man and Fighter. Penguin books. 
* Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate (1999),
ISBN 1857026373 (biography of Marx)

== See also ==
*Friedrich Engels
*Marxism
*historical materialism
*Das Kapital  
*The Frankfurt School
*History of socialism

==External links==
===Bibliography and Online Texts===
Commons|Karl Marx
wikisource author
quote
* Marx and Engels Internet Archive
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/cr
itique-hpr/ Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right (1843)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/je
wish-question/ On the Jewish Question (1843)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/ja
mes-mill/ Notes on James Mill (1844)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/ma
nuscripts/preface.htm Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844 (1844)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/th
eses/theses.htm Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/ge
rman-ideology/ The German Ideology with Engels
(1845-46)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/po
verty-philosophy/ The Poverty of Philosophy
(1846-47)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wa
ge-labour/ Wage-Labour and Capital (1847)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/co
mmunist-manifesto/ Manifesto of the Communist
Party with Engels (1847-48)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18
th-brumaire/ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (1852)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/gr
undrisse/ Grundrisse (1857-58) 
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/cr
itique-pol-economy/ A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy (1859)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/us
-civil-war/index.htm Writings on the U.S. Civil
War with Engels; compiled (1861)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/th
eories-surplus-value/ Theories of Surplus Value, 3
volumes (1862)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/va
lue-price-profit/ Value, Price and Profit (1865)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1
/ch01.htm Capital vol. 1 (1867)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/ci
vil-war-france/ The Civil War in France (1871)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/go
tha/ Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01
/wagner.htm Notes on Wagner (1883)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volu
me36/ Capital, vol. 2 posthumously, by Engels
(1893)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3
/ Capital, vol. 3 posthumously, by Engels (1894)
**
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/index
.htm Letters with Engels; compiled (1833-95)
** Ethnological Notebooks — ISBN 9023209249
(1879-80)
*gutenberg author|id=Karl_Marx|name=Karl Marx
* http://www.econ.utah.edu/~ehrbar/akmc.htm:
Ehrbar´s Marx Annotations Contemporary
Annotations to Marx´ Writings, from a critical
realist perspective. Facilitates understanding of
central points often omitted
*
http://www.sicetnon.org/modules.php?op=modload&nam
e=PagEd&file=index&topic_id=2&page_id=77 text on
'the reality behind commodity fetishism.'

===Biographies===
* Vladimir Lenin's
http://welshcommunists.co.uk/karl.htm Karl Marx
Biography
* Franz Mehring's
http://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/
ch01.htm Karl Marx: The Story of His Life 
* Francis Wheen's
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj85/morg
an.htm The Man Behind the Mask

===Portraits===
* http://www.iisg.nl/collections/marx/index.html
Portraits of Karl Marx

===Encyclopedia entries===
* http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/ Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
*
http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/19xx/marx/
Ernest Mandel, Karl Marx (New Palgrave article)
Marx/Engels