Karl Marx was born in Trier on May 15, 1818, where he attended high school. He later went to Bonn to study law. His father decided to transfer him to the austere University of Berlin because Karl was leading a riotous lifestyle. He graduated in Berlin, but returned to Bonn to obtain a teaching qualification, partly because Bruno Bauer, a friend of his, was teaching there. Bauer left Bonn, with the result that Marx ended his academic career. He decided to devote himself to journalism, becoming editor of the " Rheingasse ." The newspaper was officially banned, however, on January 21, 1843. Marx was not yet 25.
In Paris, in 1844, Karl met Friedrich Engels , who would be his friend and lifelong collaborator in the systematization of the theoretical principles of communism. His collaboration with the “ Vorwarts ”, a newspaper of communist artisans, cost him expulsion from France. Meanwhile, his detachment from the Hegelian Left was increasingly maturing. Marx settled in Brussels where he organized an international network of revolutionary groups called “communist correspondence committees”. In 1847, the Communist League asked Marx and Engels to formulate a manifesto of communist principles; thus was born the Communist Manifesto . In 1849, at the age of 31, he left for England where he settled in London and, with the financial help of his friend Engels, completed the research into economics, history, sociology and politics that formed the basis of Capital . In the central section of the Manifesto, Marx presents the theory of historical materialism, later formulated in " A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy " (1859), which identifies the dominant economic system of each era as what determines the form of social organization and the historical and political configuration of that era itself. In 1864 he succeeded in founding the "International Workingmen's Association" in the English capital. He died in London on 14 March 1883 at almost 65 years of age.
The thought of Karl Marx
Karl Marx's thought was formed in contact with and against Hegel's philosophy, the ideas of the Hegelian Left, the works of classical economists, and those of the socialists he later called utopians . For Marx, Hegel's philosophy interpreted the world in an inverted manner. He reasoned as if existing institutions derived from pure rational and legitimate necessity, and the existing order was immutable. Marx makes two main accusations against Hegel: subordinating civil society to the state; and inverting the subject and the predicate. Marx owes much to the works of classical economists, as they laid the foundations for his theory that value derives from labor. He continued their work, but where economists saw relationships between objects, Marx saw relationships between men. Political economy sees the laws it highlights as eternal, immutable laws of nature. And it fails to realize that in this way it absolutizes and justifies a system of existing relationships from a specific stage of human history: it is ideology . From these studies, Marx deduced that the maximum production of wealth corresponds to the maximum impoverishment of the worker. Political economy states how things work, but does not specify why, nor does it even address the question of how they can change. Marx instead sought to understand and explain the rise of private property , attempting to highlight how it is a fact, not a law, and especially not an eternal one. Private property is, rather, a fact that results from the alienation of human labor.
Criticism of religion
It is man who creates religion , not religion that creates man. Men in particular alienate their being by projecting it onto an imaginary God, only when real existence in class society prohibits the development and realization of their humanity. To overcome this religious alienation, it is not enough to denounce it; it is necessary to change the conditions that allow the celestial chimera to arise and thrive. Religion becomes an inverted consciousness of the world . The fantastic world of the Gods exists because the irrational and unjust world of men exists. Religion is the work of a suffering and oppressed humanity forced to seek consolation in the imaginary universe of faith.
In addition to his critique of heaven, Marx criticizes the earth. Humans are alienated, stripped of their human value by the expropriation or alienation of their labor. This is no longer done for mere subsistence, and private property based on the division of labor makes it coercive. The worker is deprived of raw materials ; the tools of labor, the product of labor, are also deprived of them. The division of labor mutilates the worker's creativity and humanity. In short, the worker is a commodity in the hands of Capital. This situation can only be overcome through class struggle, which will eliminate private property and alienated labor.
Class struggle and the role of goods
According to Marx, the history of every society is the history of class struggle . Oppressors and oppressed: this, then, is what Marx sees in the travails of human history. And our era, that of the modern bourgeoisie, has by no means eliminated class antagonism but has, rather, simplified it, since society is splitting into two large classes directly opposed to each other: the bourgeoisie —that is, the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of production and employers of wages—and the proletariat , the class of wage earners, who, lacking the means of production of their own, are forced to sell their labor power to live. Marx offers proof of the inevitability of the victory of the proletariat and the decline of the bourgeoisie in Capital.
Commodities have use value and exchange value . The former is based on the quality of the commodity, the latter is something identical that exists in different commodities, making them exchangeable. The exchange between commodities is a relationship between producers, between humans, and to speak of the commodity itself, without considering that it is the fruit of human labor, is to fetishize it . Labor is a commodity that the owner sells in exchange for wages to the owner of capital.
Marx therefore distinguishes between constant capital , that invested in the purchase of the means of production, and variable capital , that invested in the purchase of labor power. The general formula representing the capitalist production process is the following: DM-M', where M is the money spent on the purchase of the commodity, C is the commodity, and M' is the money earned, which, thanks to the surplus value not paid by the capitalist, will be greater than M. Furthermore, surplus value can be increased through two fundamental methods: the extension of the working day, which represents absolute surplus value, and the reduction of the necessary working day, which is instead defined as relative surplus value.
The works
In 1843, Karl Marx wrote the “ Critique of Hegel's Public Law .” Between 1845 and 1846, he and Engels published “ The Holy Family, ” a work against Bauer's philosophical views. With Engels, he also began drafting the “ German Ideology ,” the first comprehensive exposition of historical materialism. He also wrote the “ Theses on Feuerbach .” With his close friend Engels, he subsequently published the “ Communist Manifesto ” in 1848. Three years later, he wrote “ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, ” in which he analyzes the coup d'état of December 2, 1851. In 1859, he completed the manuscript “ A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy .” In 1865, he wrote “ Wages, Prices and Profit .” In 1867, the first volume of “ Capital ” was published by Meissner in Hamburg , with a print run of 1.000 copies. In 1875 he wrote the third volume of “Das Kapital”.
Ferdinand Capicotto
