Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–1883) was a German philosopher, economist, journalist and political theorist. Born in Trier in the Prussian Rhineland, he studied law and philosophy, joined the circle of Young Hegelians, and turned to economic and political questions in the 1840s. With Friedrich Engels he wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848), and his main economic work, Capital, appeared in its first volume in 1867. He spent most of his adult life in exile in London, where he died in 1883.
Marx's central ideas include historical materialism, the view that social change follows from the development of productive forces and class relations; a critique of capitalism built on the labour theory of value and the concept of surplus value; and the notions of alienation and commodity fetishism. Many of these concepts became part of the vocabulary of sociology, political economy and history, and his name became attached to a broad range of socialist movements, state ideologies and academic schools. His influence is therefore both intellectual and political, and it remains contested.
This entry follows his life and intellectual development, from his doctoral studies and early critique of religion to his journalism, his partnership with Engels, and the major works of his maturity. It then covers his core theories, his political writings and role in the First International, his final years, and the posthumous history of Marxism in the Second International, in state socialism and in academic thought, closing with the principal criticisms and unresolved debates.
Early life in Trier and university training
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, a town in the Rhineland that had come under Prussian rule after the Napoleonic period. His father, Heinrich Marx, was a lawyer from a family that included rabbis among its earlier generations. In 1824 the family converted to Protestantism, a step usually linked to the professional restrictions that Jews faced in Prussia. Trier was predominantly Catholic, so the household occupied a somewhat marginal position in local society, and the boy grew up in a milieu shaped by the tension between his family's ancestry and its adopted faith.
He attended the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Trier. His final school essay, written in 1835 on the choice of a vocation, already shows a moral vocabulary centred on serving humanity and on the dignity of common aims. In the autumn of 1835 he enrolled in law at the University of Bonn, as his father wished. His time there was undisciplined: he joined a student club, drank heavily, ran up debts and was briefly detained for disorderly conduct. His father, alarmed, arranged for him to transfer to the University of Berlin, which he entered in 1836 and where he remained until 1841. Officially he continued to study law, but his interests moved steadily toward history, literature and philosophy.
In Berlin the decisive influence was philosophy itself. Hegel had died in 1831, but his system was still the dominant intellectual framework of the university, and it was debated fiercely by students and younger scholars. Marx read widely, wrote poetry and extensive notebooks, and gradually abandoned legal studies. He joined the Doktorclub, a circle of Hegelian students and junior lecturers around Bruno Bauer that came to be known as the core of the Young Hegelians. Within this group, Hegel's account of reason working through history was used to attack the conservative Prussian state and the religious orthodoxy that supported it. Marx's engagement with these debates laid the groundwork for his later criticism of religion and of the political order.
Marx's academic plans took a specific form in his doctoral dissertation, "The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature." He submitted it to the University of Jena, which was more accommodating than Berlin, and received his doctorate in 1841. The thesis compared the atomism of Democritus with that of Epicurus and argued that Epicurus had grasped the significance of the "swerve" of atoms, a small deviation that for him made freedom and self-consciousness possible. Marx's sympathy for Epicurus, rather than for the more deterministic Democritus, reflected a concern with human autonomy that would recur in his later writings on ethics and political philosophy, and it is one of the first signs of a philosophical interest in the active subject.
Marx had hoped to pursue an academic career, but the dismissal of Bruno Bauer from his teaching post at Bonn in 1842 made a university position unlikely for a Young Hegelian with radical sympathies. Meanwhile, he had been engaged since the late 1830s to Jenny von Westphalen, a childhood acquaintance from a Prussian aristocratic family. The couple married on 19 June 1843 at Kreuznach. The marriage was made possible in part by Jenny's family's acceptance of the match, despite the differences in status and religious background, and it would later be central to Marx's life in exile. The end of his academic prospects pushed him toward journalism, which became the next stage of his career.
Young Hegelians and the critique of religion
Marx's first intellectual circle was the Young Hegelians, a group of radical followers of Hegel's philosophy. After he transferred to Berlin at the end of 1836, he became a member of the Young Hegelian Doktorklub, a bohemian group whose leading figure was the theologian, Bruno Bauer. The members were not all students. This group consisted of high-school teachers, university lecturers, and several reputable academics such as Bruno Bauer (theology lecturer), Karl Koppen (history teacher), and Ludwig Feuerbach (philosopher and anthropologist). They met in a small cafe and in private rooms where they often applied philosophy to religious ideas and theology. Their shared conviction was that in destroying the illusions of religion, philosophy would provide both the necessary and the sufficient conditions for human emancipation and the achievement of a rational state.
The most important influence on this stage of Marx's thought was Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach's influential work The Essence of Christianity (1841) argued that God was merely a projection of humanity's own alienated "species-essence", a concept that profoundly influenced his contemporaries, including the young Karl Marx. Feuerbach's argument reversed the usual relation between believer and deity: the attributes assigned to God were, in fact, the attributes of human beings, projected outward and then worshipped. Marx took from this the idea that the critique of religion was a precondition for every other form of criticism, and that alienation was a concept that could be carried beyond theology. Marx's ideas concerning alienation were greatly influenced by the critical writings on religion of Ludwig Feuerbach.
The Young Hegelian circle began to fracture after 1841. Bauer's radical writings and the political climate weakened the group: the dismissal of Bauer from his academic post in 1842 and widespread press censorship led to the movement's rapid fragmentation. Marx's break with Bauer was sharpened in 1843. Bauer had argued against the emancipation of Jews, and in "On the Jewish Question" Marx begins to make clear the distance between himself and his radical liberal colleagues among the Young Hegelians; in particular Bruno Bauer. Marx's answer was that political revolution, though necessary to overthrow a feudal regime, is not sufficient to produce real emancipation because it merely empowers people to pursue their private, egotistical, self-interests. The essay therefore called for human, not merely legal or political, emancipation.
The Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, written between mid-October and mid-December 1843 and published in February 1844, carried the religious argument further. It pointed out that religion is an "inverted consciousness of the world" produced by the "inverted world", so the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism. Here religion is no longer treated as a free-standing error of thought. It is read as a symptom of social conditions. The same text also marks a turn toward political and social analysis. The working class, the proletariat in Marx's terms, bursts forth onto the scene for the first time.
This shift is visible in the 1843 writings from Kreuznach, which Marx composed while reflecting on his experience at the Rheinische Zeitung. Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right deeply criticized Hegel's idealist view on the relationship between the State and civil society, and came to the conclusion that civil society determines the state. Marx had begun to see the modern state as the expression of underlying social relations, including property and economic interest, rather than as the realization of reason. Religious criticism thus became a route toward criticism of the state and of civil society, and eventually toward the study of political economy that would dominate his later career.
Rheinische Zeitung and the move to Paris
Marx's first sustained work as a public writer came in Cologne. The Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe began appearing on 1 January 1842 as a liberal paper founded by Rhineland businessmen, and it also gathered radical contributors. Marx started writing for it in May 1842 and was appointed to its editorial board on 15 October 1842, when he took on the editorship. Although his role was partly concealed, Marx wrote the letters of protest to the censor, which were signed by the paper's official publisher.
Editorship under censorship
The newspaper's main problem was Prussian censorship. The government had licensed the paper in the hope that it would act as a loyal counterpart to the Catholic Kölnische Zeitung, but under Marx's influence it moved steadily toward revolutionary-democratic positions. The authorities first tried to let it die of neglect: by mid-August 1842 its subscriptions had fallen to 885, yet the paper recovered after Marx joined the board and gained nearly a thousand subscribers within a month. The censors then imposed double and triple review, and the government decided to suppress the paper. Marx resigned in mid-March 1843, and the closure took effect on 1 April 1843. The paper is said to have worn out four censors during its short life.
The Moselle and wood-theft articles
Two issues drew Marx into economic questions. The first was a series of five articles, published between 25 October and 3 November 1842 under the pen name "a Rhinelander," on the Rhine Province Assembly's debates over a law that would criminalize gathering dead wood from private and communal forests. Marx argued that the proposed law served the interests of forest owners, and he pointed out that a poor offender who could not pay a fine would face imprisonment, while a wealthier one could simply buy his way out. The second was an official polemic against the paper over the condition of the Moselle wine-growing peasantry. Marx later recalled that these disputes, together with debates on free trade and protective tariffs, gave him "the first impulse to take up the study of economic questions". In his own view, the experience showed him how legislation reflected the interests of property owners, and this realization pushed him beyond the Hegelian idea of the state as the embodiment of universal reason. Friedrich Engels later argued that Marx's journalism at this time had moved him from pure politics toward economic relations and, ultimately, socialism.
Paris, 1843–45
After the paper closed, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, and the couple moved to Paris, arriving in the autumn of 1843. There he worked with Arnold Ruge on the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, a journal intended to be published abroad, where German censorship could not reach it. Only one double issue appeared, in February 1844. Publication stopped because of the difficulty of smuggling it into Germany and because the two editors disagreed sharply: Ruge was a Young Hegelian idealist and bourgeois radical, while Marx was moving toward communism. The issue nonetheless carried essays by both Marx and Engels, including Engels's critical essays on political economy, and it is often seen as marking the point at which Marx's thought turned decisively toward materialism and communism.
Paris also exposed Marx to French socialist doctrines and to organized workers' groups, and he spent his time reading political economy and French history. His activity as a contributor to the German-language weekly Vorwärts!, which mocked Prussian absolutism, prompted the Prussian government to press the French authorities to remove him. On 11 January 1845 a French expulsion order was issued against Marx, Ruge and Bernays, giving them a week to leave. Because a prosecution for high treason awaited him in Prussia, Marx went to Brussels with his family in early February 1845. Paris had given him his first real acquaintance with the working-class movement and with the economic analysis that would later define his work.
Partnership with Engels and early philosophical writings
Marx met Friedrich Engels in Paris in 1844, and the meeting began a collaboration that lasted until Marx's death. Engels, the son of a Wuppertal textile manufacturer, had already published a short essay, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher that year. Marx admired it and later credited it with turning his attention toward political economy. The two men shared a view of Hegelian philosophy and a conviction that criticism had to be grounded in social reality rather than in abstract ideas.
Engels's direct experience of industrial society gave the partnership much of its character. He had worked at his family's firm in Manchester from 1842, and he drew on that experience, along with reports and working-class newspapers, for The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). The book described urban poverty, factory labour, and the divisions between classes in Britain's industrial towns. For Marx, whose earlier writing had dealt mainly with religion, the state, and Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Engels's work pointed to the economic relations of industrial capitalism as the terrain on which political questions had to be answered.
Expelled from Paris in early 1845, Marx moved to Brussels, where Engels soon joined him, and the two produced their first joint writings. The Holy Family (1845) was a polemic against Bruno Bauer and his circle among the post-Hegelian Young Hegelians, whose "critical criticism" the authors treated as an idealist detachment from real social conflict. The German Ideology, written in 1845–46, was a longer attack on Young Hegelian and Feuerbachian thought and on "true socialist" writers. It set out in systematic form the claim that ideas arise from material life and social organization. The manuscript was never published in the authors' lifetimes. Marx later remarked that they had left it to the gnawing criticism of the mice, and it appeared in full only in 1932.
The Theses on Feuerbach, written by Marx in the spring of 1845, are eleven short notes that were not intended for publication. They criticize materialism for treating the object only as something to be contemplated, and idealism for developing the active side of human life only in the abstract. They place sensuous human activity, or practice, at the centre of knowledge and social reality. Engels published the notes in 1888 as an appendix to his own book on Feuerbach, and they are often read as a programmatic statement of historical materialism. Their final thesis contrasts interpreting the world with changing it, a formulation that has shaped the reception of Marx's work ever since.
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, written in Paris and left unpublished, are a different kind of text. They consist of notebooks in which Marx commented on political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and they discuss wages, profit, rent, the division of labour, and money from a humanist standpoint. Their central contribution is the concept of alienated labour. Marx argued that under wage labour the worker is estranged from the product of work, from the activity itself, from his own species-being, and from other people. The manuscripts were published in 1932, and their emergence reopened a long debate, taken up in later sections of this entry, about the relation between the early humanist writings and Marx's mature work in political economy.
The 1848 revolutions and The Communist Manifesto
The Manifesto grew out of the Communist League, a German workers' association that was, under the conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At its congress in London in November 1847, the League asked Marx and Engels to prepare a full theoretical and practical programme for the party. In draft form, written by Engels, the text was a credo in question-and-answer form, which Marx and Engels recast as a manifesto. The German text was drawn up in January 1848 and sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French Revolution of February 24. It appeared on 21 February 1848 under the title Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei.
The pamphlet's central historical claim is that all recorded social history has been a history of conflicts between classes. It framed the modern bourgeoisie as the class that had overturned feudal relations and remade production, and it set against it the proletariat, the modern working class, who possess no property and must sell their labor to survive. Its analysis of capitalism, rather than a forecast of communism's future forms, was meant to explain the class conflict of the day and to define the League's aims. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle and the conflicts of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.
Marx's political work during the revolution was centred on Cologne. He had been expelled from Belgium when the revolution broke out and moved first to France and then, from April 1848, to Cologne. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was founded on 1 June 1848 in Cologne, part of the Rhineland. Marx was editor-in-chief, and his editorial staff included Engels, Ferdinand and Wilhelm Wolff, Ernst Dronke, Heinrich Bürgers, and the poets Georg Weerth and, from October 1848, Ferdinand Freiligrath. Most of them were leading members of the League of Communists. The paper addressed a readership that it considered to be all of Germany, beyond the Rhine Province, and at its height its circulation reached around 6,000 copies. It appeared in altogether 301 editions before the end.
The paper's run ended with the counter-revolution. It was shut down in 1849 by an act of Prussian censorship. After the victory of the Prussian counter-revolution, the paper was banned in May 1849 and Marx was expelled from Prussia, and he never succeeded in recovering his citizenship. Marx then went into exile in London.
The Manifesto itself had little immediate effect. Its first run was small, and the initial impact of the Manifesto on the 1848 revolutions was limited, partly because it was too new, too little known, and its distribution too constrained. Returning League members took copies back to Germany in spring 1848, but it exerted no massive influence during the revolution. Its promised immediate translation into several languages was also not carried out. The first English translation, by Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney's Red Republican in London in 1850. A French version had come out in Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848.
The programme itself set out a sequence of aims: forming the proletariat into a class, overthrowing bourgeois rule, and raising the working class to political power, followed by a ten-point list of measures for a working-class revolution. Marx and Engels later judged that, in view of the growth of modern industry and the experience of the February Revolution and the Paris Commune, this programme had in some details become antiquated. Serious attention to the text came largely after the Paris Commune of 1871. Serious attention to its contents had to await the world-shaking events of the Paris Commune in 1871, the growth of a strong working-class movement, and, much later, the Bolshevik Revolution.
London exile and the economic manuscripts
Marx reached London in the summer of 1849, after the Prussian and French authorities had pushed him out of the Rhineland and Paris. He had expected a short stay, but he remained in England, stateless, for the rest of his life. The first years were marked by extreme hardship. The family, which had grown to include Laura, Edgar and the infant Guido, lived in cramped rooms in Soho, one of the poorest districts of the city. Several of the children died in this period, and pawned household goods, unpaid bills and borrowing became routine. Marx depended on Friedrich Engels, who had moved to Manchester to work in his family's cotton business and sent money regularly. Without that support, the family's survival would have been much harder to sustain. Marx's own letters from these years describe the strain with a candour that contrasts with the detached tone of his published work.
Marx's main income came from journalism. From 1851 he wrote articles for the New-York Tribune, then one of the most widely read English-language daily papers. Payment was modest, about two pounds per article, and it fell when the American paper cut its budget during the economic downturns of the 1850s. Engels often drafted pieces under Marx's name, especially in the early years, when Marx's English was less fluent and his time was consumed by other work. The articles covered European politics, British affairs and the revolutions of the previous decade, and they allowed Marx to follow current events closely while building his own analysis of the period.
The more important source of his intellectual work was the reading room of the British Museum. Marx spent long days there, working through government reports, parliamentary papers, economic treatises and histories of political economy. In 1850 he resumed the economic studies that had been interrupted by the revolution of 1848 and the editing of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Over the following years he compiled a vast body of notes, excerpts and comparisons, and he came to see London as a privileged vantage point for observing bourgeois society at the height of industrialization.
The Grundrisse, a set of notebooks written in 1857 and 1858, is the clearest product of this phase. Marx began it in response to the Panic of 1857, a financial crisis that struck Britain, the United States and continental Europe, and he wrote it largely for his own clarification rather than for publication. The manuscript, whose title means "Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy," is long and unfinished. It develops the analysis of money, the circulation of capital, and the concept of surplus value, and it contains passages on pre-capitalist forms of production and on the role of technology in capitalist development. Because it was not published in Marx's lifetime, its influence was delayed; the first German edition appeared in Moscow only in 1939 and 1941, and it became widely read in the 1960s and 1970s. Its wide-ranging and sometimes provisional character makes it a key source for understanding how Marx's economic theory was built, rather than simply a preliminary version of Capital.
The first published fruit of this work was A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, issued in Berlin in 1859. The short book examines commodities and money and was meant to be the first part of a larger system, but it attracted little attention when it appeared. Its preface, however, became one of the most cited passages in Marx's writings. In it he sketches a general account of history: the economic structure of a society, which he calls its base, is made up of the relations of production, and on this base arises a legal and political superstructure, with which corresponding forms of social consciousness are associated. He argues that changes in the material conditions of production eventually bring the existing relations into conflict with the forces of production, opening a period of social revolution. This formulation is the source of the later notion of base and superstructure, which has been read in many different ways, from strict economic determinism to a more flexible account of how economic structures shape political and cultural life.
Capital, Volume I: structure and publication
Volume I of Capital appeared in Hamburg in 1867, published by Otto Meissner, but it was the product of more than two decades of work and of years of later revision. Marx delivered the manuscript in person in early 1867, and the publisher agreed that the full work would appear in several volumes, a plan that Marx's later manuscripts and Engels's editing expanded and altered. Marx had intended the first volume as a continuation of his earlier Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), and the subtitle "A Critique of Political Economy" signals that the book was meant as a critique of political economy rather than a manual for it.
Structure of the book
Volume I is organized as eight parts plus an appendix, and its architecture moves from the most abstract categories to the concrete conditions of the factory. Part I deals with commodities and money, beginning with the dual character of the commodity as use value and exchange value. Part II, "The Transformation of Money into Capital," introduces the general formula for capital and the purchase and sale of labour-power, which Marx presents as the specific commodity that makes surplus value possible. Parts III to V analyse the production of absolute and relative surplus value. Part III includes the chapter on the working day, in which the length of the working day becomes a contested social question, and Part IV turns to relative surplus value, in which machinery and the division of labour raise productivity. Part VI treats wages, Part VII the accumulation of capital, and Part VIII "the so-called primitive accumulation." The last part is historically the most sweeping: it traces the expropriation of the agricultural population, the role of the state in forcing down wages, and the origins of the capitalist farmer and industrial capitalist. Its final chapters on colonization and the "historical tendency" of accumulation were meant to show how the earlier analysis of capital rests on prior violent separation of producers from their means of production.
Sources and method
Marx relied heavily on empirical material rather than purely theoretical argument. The chapters on the working day and on the factory draw on parliamentary reports, factory inspectors' reports and the evidence collected by government commissions on child and women's labour, which he quoted at length to document the effects of long hours and machinery on workers' health. Economic history, including the record of enclosures and the legislation against vagrants and wage-earners, supplies much of the material for the primitive accumulation section. This reliance on official documents gave the book a factual weight that many of its contemporaries noted, and it is one reason the text is still read by historians of industrialization as well as by economists and philosophers. The book's connection to the Industrial Revolution and to the problems of poverty in industrial Britain is therefore direct rather than metaphorical.
Revisions, translations and reception
Marx continued to revise the text after 1867. For the second German edition he prepared a substantial revision, particularly of the first chapter, where he clarified the derivation of value and the form of value. The second edition contained an afterword, dated January 1873, in which Marx defended his dialectical method against critics and discussed his relation to Hegelian philosophy. He also used the French translation as a resource for revising the German text, and he treated the French version as having independent scientific value. The French edition, titled Le Capital, was issued in serial parts between 1872 and 1875, with an afterword dated 1875; it was the first translation and it contained revisions that Marx felt the German text required. Engels's later reservations about the French style show that this process was not without friction.
The initial public response to the book was limited. The first German printing was small, and the book received few reviews in its first years, though a number of reviewers recognized its significance and a Russian translation followed. Its wider influence came later, through the translations, the posthumous volumes edited by Engels, and the growth of socialist parties that adopted it as a reference point.
Volumes II and III and Engels's editorial work
Marx did not complete the second and third volumes of Capital for publication. His drafts for Volume II were left in an unfinished state and posed serious theoretical problems The drafts of Capital, Volume Two, which were left in anything but a definitive state, present a number of theoretical problems. Marx had originally intended to issue the second and third books together as one volume, with the history of theory as a third, and the two later volumes thus took their shape only after his death.
Volume II (1885)
The 1885 volume was assembled from notes Marx had worked on across the years 1863 to 1878, and it was revised in a second German edition in 1893. Written: by Marx 1863 - 1878 and edited for publication by Engels in 1885; Published: this revised second edition in 1893 Engels's own preface acknowledged the difficulty of the task: the book had to be made coherent and as complete as possible while still representing its author rather than its editor. It was no easy task to put the second book of Capital in shape for publication
Engels's choice of sources is a point of later scholarly attention. For the second volume, he did not use the corresponding manuscript from 1864–65 but drew on later texts instead. For the second volume of Capital which he published, he did not use the corresponding manuscript of 1864-65, but later texts.
Volume III (1894)
Engels found the third volume far more demanding. The manuscript of 1864–65 served as the basis for his edition. The manuscript for book three, which was written in 1864-65, was used by Engels as a basis for his edition of the third volume in 1894. In his preface, Engels stressed that he had only a first, highly incomplete draft to work from. The work of editing the third volume was essentially different from that of editing the second. In the case of the third volume there was nothing to go by outside a first extremely incomplete draft. He also reported that the most difficult section had to be begun again almost from scratch. if it was not completed, had to be largely begun anew the following winter. This was the case with the most difficult fifth part. Engels gave the volume the title The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, which differs from the title of Marx's manuscript. Book III (under a different title, "The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole") as Volume III in 1894
The contents of the later volumes are the reason their editing matters so much. Volume II concerns the circulation of capital, and Volume III deals with the overall process of production, including the transformation of values into prices, the tendency of the profit rate to fall, credit, and ground rent.
Kautsky and Theories of Surplus Value
Marx's critical history of economic thought, later known as Theories of Surplus Value, reached print through a different editor. Theories of Surplus-Value was first published by Kautsky in 1905-10 Kautsky changed the order of the manuscript's topics and removed or altered some of its text, so his edition is not regarded as a fully accurate rendering of Marx's thought. Kautsky rearranged the original sequence of topics discussed in the notebooks and deleted or modified some text. For this reason, his edition is not regarded as a fully accurate rendering of Marx's thought Soviet editors later criticised the Kautsky edition for imposing a chronological arrangement on material that Marx had organised differently.
Debates over editing and the MEGA
The most sustained criticism of Engels's editing came from Michael Heinrich, who used the original manuscripts published in the MEGA to argue that Engels had altered Marx's text. Following the 1993 publication of the original economic manuscripts for Volumes II and III of Capital in MEGA, Heinrich argued that Engels had distorted Marx's manuscripts as part of his attempt to publish a coherent third volume. His specific objections focused on Engels's interventions, which offered solutions to problems the manuscript left open without marking them as Engels's own, and in some passages changed the argument. The interventions themselves are not just of a formal or stylistical nature; they deceive the readers about the actual extent of elaboration, they offer solutions for problems which the manuscript left open (without clarification that these are Engels' solutions!). In some passages they even change the argumentation of the original text, if this obstructs Engels' interpretations. Heinrich's position drew sharp criticism, and several scholars defended Engels's work. This stance was met with harsh criticism and generated a number of defences of Engels's editorial work. Scholars have also shown that some fragments Engels treated separately form a single continuous text. As Larissa Miskewitsch and Witali Wygodski (1985) managed to show after an exact analysis of the manuscript even before the MEGA volume was published, these are not three independent fragments: The fragments labelled I and II by Engels form a continuous text which exactly fills the gap in fragment III.
The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe is the project that makes these comparisons possible. The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) is the historical-critical edition of all publications, manuscripts, and drafts as well as the correspondence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Its principle of completeness means that there are a number of first editions, including Marx's original manuscripts for the second and third volumes of Capital. A separate MEGA volume presents a final version of Volume Two as Engels published it in 1885, alongside the drafts from which it was made. The first MEGA, begun in the 1920s, was cut short by political events, and the current edition was launched in 1975. Its volumes continue to reopen questions about the division of contributions between Marx and Engels in Capital volumes II and III.
Historical materialism and the theory of social change
Marx's account of historical change begins with a distinction between the economic base and the superstructure. The base consists of the forces of production (tools, machinery, technical knowledge, and the skills and cooperation of workers) and the relations of production (who owns the means of production, who controls labour, and how surplus is appropriated). Above this base rise the superstructure of law, the state, politics, religion, philosophy and other forms of ideology. Marx's most systematic statement of this model is the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which he presented as the guiding principle of his studies. In it he argued that the legal and political order and the forms of social consciousness correspond to a particular economic structure, and that the way people produce their material life shapes the rest of social life, not the reverse.
The Preface also sketches a sequence of modes of production (the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois), which Marx described as progressive epochs in the economic development of society. Within each mode, the mechanism of change lies in contradiction. At a certain stage, the productive forces come into conflict with the existing property and production relations, which then turn into fetters on further development. This opens an era of social revolution, in which the economic transformation sooner or later reshapes the entire superstructure. Marx added that a society never replaces its old relations of production before the material conditions for new ones have matured within it, and that the bourgeois mode is the last antagonistic form of social production. The sequence is therefore less a timetable than an explanation of why transitions occur when they do. The schema was never fully worked out in Marx's own later texts, and his notes on non-European societies and on the Russian rural commune show that he did not treat it as a single universal path.
Class struggle is the mechanism that connects these structural contradictions to concrete historical events. The opening of the Communist Manifesto (1848) holds that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, and the Manifesto treats the bourgeoisie as the class that had overturned feudal relations and was in turn creating its own gravediggers in the proletariat. The Manifesto also presents the modern state as an instrument through which the dominant economic class manages its shared interests. This political formulation is closely tied to the 1848 revolutions and is more directly political than the abstract vocabulary of the 1859 Preface. Later, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx stressed that men make their own history but do not make it as they please, which placed human agency inside structural limits.
The question of determinism has been one of the most persistent debates about this theory. Some readers take the base to be the main determining force, with the superstructure as a reflection of economic interests. Others argue that the forces of production themselves are historically shaped by social relations, so that technology cannot be treated as an independent variable. G. A. Cohen's analytical defence of a technological reading in the 1970s drew sharp responses from critics who stressed that Marx's relations of production were social and political, not merely technical. Engels, writing in the 1890s, insisted that the economic factor was ultimately decisive but acted within a web of reciprocal influences that included politics, law, religion and ideas. Later Marxists, from Gramsci's concept of hegemony to Althusser's notion of overdetermination, developed this emphasis on the autonomy and interaction of superstructural elements. Historians such as E. P. Thompson, who examined working-class culture and experience, pushed the same case from the side of agency and lived experience.
The debate remains open, partly because Marx's texts supply both a strong causal claim and many qualifications. Whether the theory is best read as a general law of history, as a methodological orientation toward explaining social forms through production, or as a hypothesis about specific transitions continues to shape how scholars assess the explanatory reach of Marx's historical work. For a broader treatment of these questions, see historical materialism, base and superstructure and modes of production; the relation of this framework to philosophy, economics and sociology is discussed in other sections.
Labour theory of value, surplus value and exploitation
Marx's economics begins with the commodity, a useful object produced for exchange. Every commodity has a use value, the qualities that make it useful, and an exchange value, the quantitative ratio in which it trades against other commodities. What all commodities share, Marx argued, is that each embodies human labour in the abstract. Value is therefore the expression of socially necessary labour time: the labour required to produce a use value under the prevailing social conditions, with the average skill and intensity of the branch. Exchange value is the form in which this value appears in market relations. Marx inherited the idea from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but he used it differently. For him the labour theory was not only an account of relative prices but a way of exposing the social relations concealed behind them.
Surplus value and the rate of exploitation
The central step in Marx's argument is that labour power, the capacity to work, is itself a commodity. Its value is set by the labour time needed to reproduce the worker, which in practice means the value of the wage goods that sustain the worker and family. When a capitalist buys labour power and puts it to work, the worker can create more value in a working day than labour power itself costs. The excess is surplus value, which Marx described as the unpaid portion of labour. The ratio of surplus value to variable capital (the money spent on wages), written s/v, is the rate of surplus value, and Marx used it as the measure of exploitation. Consider a twelve-hour day in which six hours reproduce the value of the wage and six hours produce surplus value. The rate of exploitation is then 100 per cent. In Marx's account, exploitation does not require that the worker be paid less than the commodity is worth. The worker sells labour power at its full value, and the employer benefits because the use of that commodity in production creates more value than it costs.
Absolute and relative surplus value
Marx distinguished two ways of raising surplus value. Absolute surplus value is obtained by lengthening the working day while the value of labour power stays the same. Chapter 10 of Capital, Volume I, traces the long conflict over factory hours in England, drawing on parliamentary reports and factory inspectors' evidence. Relative surplus value is obtained by shortening the necessary part of the working day, which means lowering the value of labour power. This occurs when rising productivity cheapens the goods workers consume, above all through innovation in the industries that produce wage goods. Marx analysed machinery and large-scale industry as the decisive means of this process, because they raise productivity across whole sectors and not only in the firm that adopts them. Historically, he argued, absolute extension of hours was the dominant method early on, and as legal limits on hours spread, capital relied more on relative surplus value. Individual capitalists who adopt a new method before their rivals gain an extra profit, since they sell at the prevailing social value while their own costs are lower. Competition gradually erodes this advantage as the method spreads, which in Marx's view is one of the forces that keeps driving technical change.
Organic composition of capital and profit
Marx divided the capital advanced in production into constant capital (c), such as machinery, raw materials and buildings, whose value passes into the product without creating new value, and variable capital (v), the wage fund, which is the only part that produces surplus value. The ratio c/v is what Marx called the organic composition of capital, a value-based expression of how much dead labour is embodied in production relative to living labour. Because only living labour creates new value, a rising composition tends to weaken the basis of profit. The rate of profit, p = s/(c + v), depends on both the rate of surplus value and the composition of capital. If the rate of surplus value stays constant while c/v rises, the rate of profit falls. Marx developed this in Volume III as the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and he treated it as a tendency that is counteracted by factors such as higher exploitation, cheaper constant capital and foreign trade. The argument also depends on the claim that values, not prices, are the ultimate measure of surplus, which raises the transformation problem discussed in a later section.
Taken together, these concepts link the most basic category of exchange to the wider dynamics of capitalist economies. They explain why Marx regarded wage labour as the source of profit and why he expected accumulation to reshape labour, competition and crises.
Capital accumulation, crises and the reserve army of labour
Accumulation and its chain of consequences
For Marx, the accumulation of capital is the central dynamic of capitalism. Reinvested surplus value expands production, and that expansion feeds technological change, the build-up of a surplus labour pool, and a long-run downward pressure on profit, which together produce crises and sharpen class conflict. This process drives capital accumulation, which in turn fosters technological change, the creation of a reserve army of labour, and a long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall, leading to economic crises and intensifying class conflict. Marx's own treatment of crisis is less tidy than this summary suggests. Simon Clarke observes that nowhere in his own work does Marx present a systematic and thoroughly worked-out exposition of a theory of crisis. Marx tied crises at different points to falling profit, but also to tendencies to overproduction, underconsumption, disproportionality and over-accumulation with respect to labour.
The reserve army of labour and wages
The reserve army is the stock of unemployed and underemployed workers that capital can draw on and release. Within the schema of falling profit, the reserve matters because it restrains wages. After a prolonged period of capitalist prosperity the reserve army of labour could all but disappear, forcing wages up which would cut into profits and lower the rate of profit itself. Marx's argument therefore depends on whether the reserve can be exhausted. Its cross-border character complicates this: the international mobility of labour ensures that the reserve army of labour is not entirely depleted in a period of boom.
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall
The mechanism runs through the composition of capital. Mechanisation reduces the number of workers employed relative to the fixed capital they operate, and Marx called this a rising organic composition of capital. The introduction of machinery tends to reduce the number of workers and therefore changes the ratio between variable and constant capital. Marx described this process as a rising organic composition of capital. This inevitably leads, all things being equal, to a declining rate of profit. Marx did not treat this as an unqualified law. He presented it as a tendency and listed "counteracting factors" operating which had to be studied as well, including cheapening the elements of constant capital by various means and more intense exploitation of labor. The most influential formal challenge came later: the Okishio theorem argues, within a multisectoral input-output framework, that cost-reducing innovations adopted by capitalists need not lower the profit rate under certain conditions.
Immiseration, polarization and long-run stability
The immiseration thesis is often caricatured as the claim that workers' living standards must fall in absolute terms. Scholars have questioned that reading. Marx never argued that immiseration meant an absolute fall in income for the majority. He expected slumps to throw many workers out of employment, while much of the time, and for most workers, wages would rise. The more defensible version concerns relative shares: the overall labor share of income decreases even when real wages rise. Interpreters also differ on the status of the thesis. One reading holds that it is an outcome of mechanisms which an organized and indignant working class can counteract, so that it functions as a call to political organization rather than a fixed forecast.
Predictions of polarization and of a final crisis have met mixed evidence. Carl Dassbach argues that the middle class is not an anomaly but a product of the incomplete development of capitalism, and that it faces erosion through technological change. Empirical tests of the link between accumulation, immiseration and support for socialism have also cut against the orthodox hypothesis. Eduard Bernstein, drawing on the prosperity of his own era, argued that economic prosperity under capitalism was causing a reduction in class conflict, as well as increasing the differentiation of the working class. Whether capitalism's long-run stability reflects the limits of Marx's mechanisms or the effects of countervailing forces remains contested among economists and historians.
Alienation, commodity fetishism and dialectical method
Alienation in the 1844 manuscripts
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which were not published until the twentieth century, Marx describes labour under private property as estranged labour. He distinguishes four connected forms of estrangement. The worker is separated from the object produced, which takes on the character of an alien power that the worker cannot control. The worker is separated from the activity of production, which becomes coerced and meaningless toil rather than free, conscious expression. The worker is separated from the species-being, the capacity for free and social productive activity that Marx took to define human nature. And the worker is separated from other people, because social relations come to be mediated by property, money and the market. In Marx's account, these four forms are not independent. They describe a single condition, and private property appears as the material result of estranged labour rather than its cause. The concept draws on the vocabulary of Hegel and Feuerbach, but it is applied to wage labour and class relations, which gives it a sociological and economic content that the earlier philosophical notions lacked.
Commodity fetishism
In the fourth section of the first chapter of Capital, Volume I (1867), Marx turns to what he calls the fetishism of commodities. His starting point is that in a society where goods are produced for exchange, the labour of each producer becomes social only indirectly, through the market. The relations among people who produce for one another therefore take the form of relations among things. The value of a product seems to be an objective property of the thing itself, and the social character of labour is concealed behind prices and exchange. Marx borrows the term "fetishism" from the religious sphere to describe this inversion, in which human products appear to have an autonomous life and to govern their makers. The concept is central to his method, because it explains why the capitalist economy appears to its participants as a natural order of exchange rather than as a historically specific set of social relations. Its interpretation remains contested. Some readers take it mainly as a theory of economic appearances, while others see it as a broader account of ideology and consciousness.
The inversion of Hegel's dialectic
Marx's most explicit statement on his relation to Hegel comes in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, dated January 1873. There he says that the mystifying side of Hegel's dialectic had been criticised by him nearly thirty years earlier, and that he had openly declared himself a pupil of Hegel while working on the first volume. He acknowledges that Hegel was the first to present the general form of the dialectic's movement in a comprehensive and conscious way, but adds that with Hegel the dialectic is "standing on its head". It must be turned right side up again, he writes, in order to find the "rational kernel" within the "mystical shell". The metaphor has been read in several ways. The traditional reading, associated with Engels and later Marxist orthodoxy, takes it to mean that Hegel's idealism must be replaced by materialism, so that matter rather than Spirit drives historical development. Other interpreters emphasise that Marx's own statement concerns method rather than doctrine. Louis Althusser, for example, argued that the "mystical shell" refers to the dialectic itself in its mystified form, not merely to Hegel's speculative system, and that the image of turning it over is largely metaphorical. Marx's own dialectic is therefore less a set of ready-made laws than a way of analysing a given social form through its internal contradictions and historical development.
The debate over early and mature Marx
A persistent question in Marx scholarship is how the humanist vocabulary of the 1844 manuscripts relates to the economic analysis of the mature works. One influential position, developed in the 1960s by Althusser and his circle, holds that Marx made an "epistemological break" around 1845, when he moved away from the philosophical anthropology of his early writings, including the concept of species-being, toward a scientific analysis of modes of production. On this view, alienation belongs to an earlier, ideological problematic and is largely absent from the mature theory. Critics, including many Marxist humanists and later historians, argue for continuity. They point out that the critique of estranged labour, the separation of workers from their products, and the reduction of social life to exchange relations all reappear in the analysis of commodities, of the wage relation and of capitalist domination in Capital. Others contend that the break is real but was gradual, and that the terms of the early writings were reworked rather than abandoned. The debate has consequences for how Marx's critique of capitalism is understood: whether it rests on a normative account of human nature, on an analysis of economic structures, or on both.
Political writings on class struggle in France
The Class Struggles in France (1850)
Marx wrote this analysis of the 1848 revolution while events were still unfolding. It consists of a series of articles written between January and October 1850 specially for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The works were collated and republished in 1895 by Friedrich Engels.
Marx's most distinctive argument is that the conflict was not simply one between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. He located much of the struggle among fractions of the bourgeoisie, especially between industrial capital and financial capital. He identifies conflicts between the industrial bourgeoisie, whose wealth depends on producing and selling goods, and the financial bourgeoisie, whom he identifies as bankers and stock market speculators. To show how this rivalry distorted policy, he pointed to railway schemes financed from public funds and steered by legislators who were themselves major investors in them (the example of extensive railroad projects being developed with public funds under the direction of legislators who were also the main investors).
The June Days of 1848 are, for Marx, the decisive turning point. More than three thousand insurgents were butchered after the victory, and fifteen thousand were deported without trial. Yet he did not treat the defeat as the end of the revolutionary process. In his reading, what collapsed in these reverses was not the revolution itself but the inherited attachments and illusions that the revolutionary camp still carried over from before February, which only a series of defeats could clear away (it could be freed not by the victory of February, but only by a series of defeats). The proletariat, which had earlier appeared as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois democrats, thus emerged from the failure as a more independent political force.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Marx wrote this essay between December 1851 and March 1852, and it was first published in New York in the German monthly Die Revolution. Its subject is the coup of December 1851, after which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, president of the Second Republic, became the emperor of the Second French Empire as Napoleon III. Marx's central claim is that this outcome was produced by class struggle rather than by the personal will of a great man; he explicitly rejected comparisons with the Roman Caesars (the rise of Napoleon III was the product of class struggles in France and not a "great man" story. Marx specifically targets the idea of "Caesarism.").
The essay's best-known theoretical contribution is its account of a state that gains a measure of autonomy from society. Because no single class could rule in its own name, Bonaparte could present himself as an arbiter standing above the bourgeoisie, the landowners and the workers, and he drew his power from the balance among them. Marx's verdict on this arrangement was that a regime which tried to please every class while taking from each would not last (Marx predicts that Napoleon III's regime, which is based on trying to please all the social and economic classes while taking from them all, will eventually fail.).
Fractions, peasants and the lumpenproletariat
Marx's social map of France is more granular than the Manifesto's binary model. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, the rural population is divided into the rural workers (the "peasants"), the small property owners, and the large farmers, who, together form what Marx qualifies as the vast majority of the French population. Smallholding peasants were a crucial part of the electoral base for the coup, as Napoleon did enjoy the support of what Marx calls the "lumpenproletariat" (the unemployed and criminal classes) and land-owning peasants, who backed Napoleon through an election.
The lumpenproletariat plays a particularly important role in Marx's account. Bonapartist agents organized the lumpen proletariat of Paris into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole, under the cover of a benevolent society. Marx also notes that this stratum was not solely a Bonapartist asset: in June 1848 the bourgeois republic's side included the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, alongside the financial aristocracy, the middle classes, the army and the rural population.
Writings on India, Ireland and the United States
From 1853 Marx wrote regularly for the New-York Daily Tribune, and wrote thirty-three articles on Indian affairs for the New York Tribune, from 1853, to 1858, just after the Sepoy Revolt. In the essay on the future results of British rule (July 1853), he sketched how the Mughal power, the Mahrattas and the Afghans had each been weakened in turn, so that the Briton rushed in and was enabled to subdue them all. He treated the destructive effects of British industry as only the organic results of the whole system of production as it is now constituted, a system resting on capital. In the same period, he described British colonialism as an "unconscious tool of history" that would dissolve older Asian societies and lay material foundations for Western-style society.
His treatment of Ireland drew on the same logic. In a 1853 piece on Irish tenant right, he described how a class of absentee landlords has been enabled to pocket, not merely the labour, but also the capital, of whole generations. He also compared India's social condition with Ireland's, arguing that Hindostan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East.
These writings remain contested. Scholars have questioned Marx's portrayal of pre-colonial India, since he viewed pre-colonial Indian society as unchanging and characterized by "Oriental despotism," which he argued was based on the self-sufficient village commune. His journalism on the United States, including the slavery question, is less often discussed in this context but belongs to the same body of work.
First International and the Paris Commune
The International Workingmen's Association was launched in London on 28 September 1864, at a meeting held in St Martin's Hall. The International Workingmen's Association (IWA) was born in London on September 28, 1864. From the start it was a loose coalition: the IWA was an ideologically heterogeneous body, encompassing a wide range of socialist, communist, and anarchist viewpoints. Marx drafted the inaugural address in late October 1864, and it was printed in London as a pamphlet alongside the association's General Rules. Written: October 21-27, 1864; First Published: Printed as a pamphlet in Inaugural Address and Provisional Rules of the International Working Men's Association, along with the "General Rules". Marx joined the body formally in early November.
The address opened with evidence of hardship. It argued that deprivation among the working masses had not eased between 1848 and 1864, even though industry and commerce had expanded greatly in that period. The inaugural manifesto of the First International noted the increasing impoverishment of the working class. It also held that landowners and capitalists would keep using their political privileges to protect their economic monopolies, so that winning political power became a foremost obligation for the working classes. The lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes.
The association also acted on international questions. Its General Council sent a letter to Abraham Lincoln after his re-election in 1864, and Marx wrote the text. The International sent, as one of its first acts, an address of congratulations (written by Marx) to Lincoln. The IWA also helped organize against the possibility of British armed intervention, which might have been disastrous for Lincoln, the Union, and the struggle to abolish slavery.
The Commune and its lessons
The most influential episode in the association's life was the Paris Commune. Marx's writings on the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune were composed as addresses to the General Council from July 1870 to May 1871, and they were collected as The Civil War in France. The Commune itself was a short-lived insurrectionary government. It was a revolutionary government made up of France's working class and national guard that seized power in Paris for 72 days in Spring 1871. Marx treated it as a precedent: the first workers' government in history. He praised it in strong terms, calling it the glorious harbinger of a new society.
Marx drew a practical lesson from the experience. He concluded that workers could not simply take over the existing state apparatus and use it for their own ends. "One thing especially was proved by the Commune," writes Marx. "That the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes." This judgement later shaped debates within socialism about the state. The Commune's defeat was followed by severe repression. The International had reached its peak in the wake of the Commune, which was celebrated and defended by the International in Marx's influential address, but the bloody suppression of the Commune led to a period of harsh government repression against the IWA.
Factional conflict and the split
Behind the organization's unity lay a conflict between Marx and Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin framed the dispute as one between a centralizing, state-oriented communist camp and an anarchist camp that rejected elections and the seizure of power. For Bakunin the IWA was involved in a struggle between two parties: one "communist and authoritarian," favoring the economic emancipation of the proletariat via the state; the other collectivist and anarchist. Structurally, the Bakuninist federations grew into a majority while the General Council remained in Marxist and Blanquist hands. This group represented the majority of the organization, while the Marxists and Blanquists were allied and controlled the General Council of the IWA.
The decisive break came after the London Conference of 1871, which suppressed the Bakuninist groups. The Jura Federation, a Bakuninist branch, responded by denouncing the decision and calling for a looser organization. The Bakuninist Jura Federation, at its Sonvillier Congress in November 1871, issued a circular to all federations denouncing the London Conference's decision as an imposition of "authoritarian" German communist doctrine. The dispute came to a head at the Hague Congress, held from 2 to 7 September 1872, which marked the split between the Marxists and the anti-authoritarians/anarchists, two political movements that separated during this congress. Bakunin and his ally James Guillaume were expelled. The congress voted to transfer the seat of the General Council to New York City, which effectively marked the end of the IWA as a mass European movement.
The expelled faction responded quickly. Its supporters held a counter-congress at Saint-Imier on 15 September 1872 and decided to invalidate the decisions taken at The Hague and to refound the International based on statutes ensuring the autonomy and freedom of the federations composing it. The anti-authoritarian International was formalized the following year. Under the New York-based General Council, the original association was wound down, and the New York-based General Council officially disbanded the original International in 1876.
Later years, the Gotha critique and death
The unification of the German workers' movement in 1875 pushed Marx into one of his last major political interventions. His Critique of the Gotha Programme opposed the tendency of his followers Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel to compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party. The text was a private letter written in April or early May 1875, and it stayed out of print until Engels published it in 1891, after the party had already moved on. The SPD would go on to address these criticisms seriously, formulating the new and improved Erfurt Program in 1891 after Marx's death in 1883. Marx's main objections were that the draft treated labour as the sole source of wealth and that its demand for the "equitable distribution" of society's total labour ignored the need to replace used-up means of production, to fund expansion, and to keep reserves. He also sketched the transition from capitalism to communism as having a "lower phase," in which individuals receive from society exactly what they give to it, and a later "higher phase" beyond that.
Ethnology and the Russian commune
In his final years Marx turned away from the economic analysis of Capital and toward the history and social organization of non-European and pre-capitalist societies. His reading notes from this period, known as the Ethnological Notebooks, drew on anthropologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan. Among his later works were significant revisions for the 1872–1875 French edition of Capital, the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, his correspondence with Russian populists such as Vera Zasulich, and his anthropological notebooks.
The Zasulich correspondence was the most consequential of these late exchanges. In February 1881 Vera Zasulich initiated a correspondence with Marx on whether the rural commune, the obshchina, could develop in a socialist direction or whether it was destined to perish as an archaism. Marx drafted several replies. His position, as it is usually read, was that a peasant commune such as the Russian obshchina might serve as a starting point for communist development without passing through the full course of industrial capitalism, but only if it were linked to a proletarian revolution in Western Europe. Marx explored the potential for agrarian, non-capitalist societies like Russia to achieve a communist transformation without first undergoing the full development of industrial capitalism, provided such a revolution could link up with a proletarian revolution in Western Europe. The exchange is therefore often cited as evidence that Marx did not regard the stages of history as rigidly fixed, although his drafts were not published in his lifetime.
Illness and family losses
Marx's health had been deteriorating for years, and the period after 1881 was marked by personal bereavement. During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he was incapable of the sustained effort that had characterized his previous work. His wife Jenny von Westphalen died in December 1881. Following the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last fifteen months of his life. His eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet, died in 1883, a loss that came only weeks before his own death.
Death and burial
Marx died in London on 14 March 1883. The bronchitis and pleurisy that eventually killed him had been brought on by his prolonged illness. He had no citizenship at the time of his death. He died a stateless person and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, on 17 March 1883. The funeral was small. He was buried at Highgate cemetery in the same plot as his wife, but only 11 people attended. Engels spoke at the graveside, and his short address became one of the most frequently quoted tributes to Marx.
Second International and the spread of Marxist parties
In July 1889, delegates met in Paris on the centenary of the storming of the Bastille and founded the Second International. The First International had lapsed after its Hague Congress of 1872 and was formally wound up in 1876, and by the late 1880s socialist groups in many countries had grown into organised parties. Unlike the First International, which was a more centralised body, the new organisation was a federation of national parties and trade unions. Its founding congress was held in two rival gatherings: one, built around the German Social Democrats and the French Marxists Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, identified with Marxism, while the other, around Paul Brousse's Possibilists and British delegates, was more moderate and reformist. The Marxist side dominated, and Friedrich Engels, who was still alive, helped the organisation take shape.
The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the movement's model. Despite the anti-socialist laws of 1878–90, it grew into a mass working-class party, and its organisational success gave the International much of its character. The Erfurt Programme of 1891 expressed this Marxist identity: its theoretical section was drafted by Karl Kautsky, and its tactical section by Eduard Bernstein. Parties in France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Britain and Scandinavia followed similar patterns, and by 1912 the International included socialist and social-democratic parties from almost every European country, as well as from the United States, Canada and Japan, with a combined membership of nearly nine million. Its resolutions committed it to socialist goals, advocated the use of parliamentary democracy, opposed alliances with non-socialist parties, and reaffirmed class struggle as the central idea. Russia's Social Democratic Labour Party, founded in 1898, was another member; it split in 1903 into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
The most serious doctrinal dispute came from within the SPD. In a series of articles published in Die Neue Zeit between 1896 and 1898, Bernstein argued that Marx had underestimated capitalism's capacity to reform. He pointed to rising living standards, trade union gains and expanding suffrage, and concluded that socialism could be reached gradually through democratic politics, with the movement itself counting for more than a final revolutionary goal. He also questioned the prediction of capitalism's inevitable collapse. Kautsky defended orthodoxy, insisting that the bourgeois state remained a class instrument and that reforms could not transcend capitalism without a revolutionary break. Rosa Luxemburg sided with the anti-revisionists. Yet Kautsky conceded a good deal in the debate: he did not defend the monistic character of dialectical materialism, did not think capitalism was fated to collapse, and treated the dictatorship of the proletariat as a remote question. The SPD leadership voted against Bernstein's position in 1899 and 1901, but in practice reformist politics expanded through electoral campaigns and trade union networks, while the party kept revolutionary language in its programme. The disagreement was never formally resolved.
The movement's unity broke down in 1914. Although the International had declared its opposition to a European war, most of its major parties voted to support their governments when World War I began, and the organisation ceased to function. Anti-war socialists formed new groupings, among them the Independent Social Democratic Party, which Bernstein and Kautsky joined. The Russian Revolution of 1917, led by the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin, changed the terms of the debate. Lenin argued that a disciplined vanguard party was needed, that capitalism had entered an imperialist stage, and that revolution could succeed in a country like Russia. These ideas were systematised as Marxism-Leninism, which became the official ideology of the Soviet Union. The Third (Communist) International, founded in 1919, was built on that model, while those who remained committed to social democracy re-formed the Labour and Socialist International in 1923.
Between 1889 and 1945 the Marxist camp was never a single bloc. Alongside the German orthodox current and the Bolsheviks, there were Austro-Marxists such as Otto Bauer and Max Adler, who sought a middle path, as well as French, Italian and Spanish currents, each with different relations to parliamentary politics. Anarcho-syndicalists were excluded from the International, and the earlier anarchist faction had been expelled in 1896. Parties often had uneasy relations with trade unions, which tended to focus on immediate wage and labour issues, and with intellectual circles that produced new theoretical work. These tensions over strategy, the role of the state and the place of reform were carried into the interwar period and shaped the later split between communist and social-democratic movements.
Marxism in state socialism and global politics
The most far-reaching afterlife of Marx's ideas came through states that claimed his name. The formal doctrine used in the Soviet Union and its allies was called Marxism–Leninism, the official state ideology adopted by the USSR, its satellite states in Eastern Europe, the Asian communist regimes, and various "scientific socialist" regimes in the Third World during the Cold War. The doctrine rested on three principles: dialectical materialism as the basis for philosophy, the leading role of the communist party in politics, and state-led planned industrialization and agricultural collectivization as the foundation of socialist economics. Its label is itself contested, since the term blends a selection from Marx's own writings with Lenin's work and later Soviet additions. Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union was a selected mix of the prolific writings of Marx and Lenin, in addition to inclusions made by Soviet political authorities.
The doctrine was consolidated under Stalin. After 1924, Marxist–Leninist ideology as interpreted by Stalin was consolidated as Communist Party orthodoxy both in the Soviet Union and through the Comintern. A later textbook also helped establish the term. In 1938, Stalin's official textbook History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) popularised Marxism–Leninism. The institutional model was built around a single ruling party. In doctrine, a vanguard party, organized through democratic centralism, seizes power on behalf of the proletariat and establishes a one-party communist state. Once in power, the state controls the means of production, suppresses opposition, counter-revolution, and the bourgeoisie, measures presented as a path toward a classless and stateless society. The same framework was adopted across the Eastern Bloc and in parts of the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World during the Cold War.
Marxist-Leninist rule was never uniform, and it fractured repeatedly. These adaptations caused several splits between communist states, resulting in the Tito–Stalin split, the Sino-Soviet split, and the Sino-Albanian split. The rivalry with China was especially sharp. After the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China each claimed to be the true intellectual heir to Marxism-Leninism. In China, the term "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought" (commonly known as Maoism) was increasingly used to describe the official state ideology. Yugoslavia gave a different emphasis, treating social and economic aspects of self-government as significant features of the communist ideology.
The Cold War context shaped how both regimes and their critics read Marx. Debate inside the Soviet bloc centred on how the early philosophical writings related to Marx's later economic work. Only after the open rejection of Stalin (not necessarily Stalinism) did it become "permissible" to study the early works of Marx in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1965 the Polish philosopher Adam Schaff argued that "alienation" in the Marxian meaning of the term did exist in socialist countries. Outside the bloc, Western observers often used the term "communist states" for regimes that described themselves as Marxist-Leninist. Marxist–Leninist states are commonly referred to as "communist states" by Western academics.
Historians still disagree about how far these regimes followed Marx. There is no definite agreement among historians about whether or not Stalin actually followed the principles established by Marx and Lenin. Much of the disagreement concerns the state itself. Marx gave relatively little detail about how a post-revolutionary state would organize the economy, leaving subsequent generations of socialists to fill in the practical blueprint. He also criticised the notion that the state should create worker cooperatives, objecting to a model in which the state rather than the workers brought the socialist organization of labour into being (Marx also criticized the harmful influence of Lassalle's perspective on the Gotha Programme). Scholarly assessments have also been reshaped by documents. After 1991, both totalitarian and revisionist theories about the nature of Marxism–Leninism have come into question, partly because archives showed that party leaders really did communicate in the idiom of official Marxism–Leninism, even in their private correspondence, until nearly the end of the Gorbachev era. The later reforms in China and elsewhere also raised the question of how much of the doctrine remained. As the Cold War waned and concluded with the demise of much of the socialist world, many of the surviving communist states reformed their economies and embraced market socialism.
Western Marxism and critical theory
"Western Marxism" is a loose label for non-Soviet Marxist thought that developed mainly in the 1920s and after. Its authors began from the failure of revolution in industrialised Western Europe, which suggested that economic crisis would not by itself produce socialism. They therefore shifted attention from the economic base toward culture, consciousness, ideology and philosophy. The term is used more for a family of concerns than for a single school, and its boundaries are contested.
Lukács and reification
Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923) took Marx's analysis of the commodity as its starting point. Lukács argued that under capitalism social relations between people take on the form of relations between things, a condition he called reification. Drawing on Max Weber's account of rationalisation, he held that workers experience this world as natural and unalterable. He placed the way out in the proletariat's capacity to grasp society as a historical totality, so that the decisive obstacle to revolution was located in consciousness rather than in economic conditions alone. Soviet-aligned critics condemned the book, and Lukács later partly repudiated it. Its influence nonetheless shaped the later turn toward culture.
Gramsci and hegemony
Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by Mussolini's regime from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937, wrote the Prison Notebooks on the question of why the working class in advanced capitalist states had not overthrown their rulers. His answer was hegemony: domination maintained largely through consent, organised within civil society through schools, churches, the press, trade unions and political parties, and backed by coercion only when necessary. Gramsci distinguished between a "war of manoeuvre", a frontal seizure of state power of the kind he associated with Russia in 1917, and a "war of position", a long struggle to build an alternative cultural and intellectual leadership inside civil society. This analysis gave Marxists a theory of the cultural and political foundations of stability, and it has been widely adopted in cultural studies and political theory.
The Frankfurt School
The Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1923, gathered thinkers who came to be known as the Frankfurt School. After the Nazi seizure of power the institute relocated to New York, and its members, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, developed what they called critical theory. In his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", Horkheimer contrasted theory that describes and confirms existing order with theory that aims at emancipation. Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, expanded 1947) argued that Enlightenment reason had degenerated into instrumental rationality that served domination, and it analysed the mass-produced "culture industry" as a means of integrating people into the system. Marcuse extended this diagnosis in Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964), in which he argued that consumer capitalism had absorbed the working class and closed off opposition. His work was influential in the New Left of the 1960s. Many members of the school were sceptical of the economic theory of Marx and of the Soviet system alike, and their writings were more concerned with sociology, aesthetics and psychology than with the labour theory of value.
Analytical Marxism
Analytical Marxism emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s, mainly among English-speaking philosophers and economists. Its aim was to restate Marx's central claims with the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy, economics and game theory. G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978) reconstructed historical materialism as a form of functional explanation, while John Roemer tried to define exploitation in terms of unequal ownership of productive assets rather than in terms of labour value. Jon Elster criticised functional explanations and drew on rational-choice theory and methodological individualism, and Erik Olin Wright and Adam Przeworski applied similar methods to class structure and to the prospects for socialism. The movement tended to discard large parts of Marx's historical and dialectical vocabulary, and its relation to the continental tradition of Western Marxism has remained a point of debate.
Taken together, these currents redirected Marxist theory away from the economic determinism of the Second and Third Internationals. They also raised questions about how far Marx's categories could be applied to a capitalism whose main forms of domination appeared cultural, bureaucratic or technological. These questions are discussed further in the sections on Marxism in state socialism and on Marx's influence in the social sciences.
Influence on the social sciences and humanities
Marx's influence on the social sciences is clearest in sociology, where he is counted among the discipline's founders alongside Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. The three shared an interest in the division of labour but reached different conclusions: Marx stressed exploitation and alienation, while Durkheim saw the possibility of solidarity and moral integration. Concepts such as class, exploitation and alienation became standard vocabulary in the field even among scholars who rejected his conclusions.
Max Weber is often presented as a revision of Marx rather than a follower. Weber treated class as one dimension of stratification, next to status and party, the latter meaning political influence (class is just one dimension of social stratification, which also includes status and party). He also rejected the sharp binary Marx used, describing class as a continuum tied to economic position, which produces different life chances. Weber further doubted the polarisation that Marx considered central to capitalist class structure, and did not share the expectation of an inevitable proletarian revolution. In modern stratification research, ownership-based models of class remain a reference point, while multidimensional models built on Weber's distinctions are now widely used.
Marx's influence on the study of global inequality runs largely through Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein developed his framework in the 1970s, with his major work The Modern World-System appearing in 1974. He drew on Marxism, dependency theory, and the French Annales school of history. From Marx, Wallerstein took the dichotomy between capital and labour, a staged view of world economic development, and a dialectical sense of motion through conflict and contradiction. His model treats the world as a single market-integrated economy in which core countries dominate and exploit peripheral countries for labor and raw materials, with a semi-periphery in between. Dependency theory, a neo-Marxist explanation of development processes, was especially influential in Latin America, where it focused on core–periphery relations. Wallerstein's approach is often described as an adaptation of that tradition.
In literary and cultural studies, Marxist criticism rests on historical materialism and asks how texts relate to the economic conditions of their production. Marxist critics examine the ways in which literature reflects and reinforces the dominant ideology and power structures of a society. Gramsci's concept of hegemony became one of its most used tools, helping critics see how texts can subtly reinforce or undermine dominant ideologies. Postcolonial criticism drew heavily on these ideas. Gramsci, Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault are often counted among its pioneers, and Marxist-derived frameworks were adapted to study themes of exploitation and resistance in colonised societies. The broader tradition also has an anticolonial strand: in the early twentieth century, Marxism was among the few established political traditions that consistently rejected colonialism and racism.
These adaptations have been contested. The critic E. San Juan Jr. argues that Edward Said's use of Gramsci takes culture, located in civil society, as the chief instrument for inducing consent and therefore hegemony. The state disappears since hegemony becomes culturalized. Materialist critics such as Benita Parry and Neil Lazarus have likewise tried to separate cultural analysis from the excesses of poststructuralism. The result is that Marxist concepts now run through cultural materialism, postcolonial theory and feminist criticism, but scholars continue to disagree about how far the material base should govern the reading of culture. Marxian ideas also reached economic history, labour history and geography, where scholars such as E. P. Thompson and David Harvey built on his analysis of industrialisation and class formation.
Criticisms, debates and unresolved questions
The Austrian objections to Marx's economics
Marx's economics drew sustained opposition from the Austrian school, above all from economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. His main line of attack was against the labour theory of value itself. He argued that the return on capital comes from the roundabout character of production, in which tools, materials and machines must be built up over time before a commodity reaches the market. On this view, prices can cover more than the labour embodied in a good, so profit does not need to be explained as the exploitation of labour. Böhm-Bawerk also argued that a theory of exchange based on equal values has trouble accounting for trade, since there is little motive to exchange when values are exactly equal.
Böhm-Bawerk's most influential charge was internal. He claimed that Volume I of Capital assumes commodities tend to sell at their labour values, while Volume III drops that assumption and describes prices of production that diverge from values. He presented this as a contradiction that Marx had not resolved. Rudolf Hilferding replied in 1904 that Böhm-Bawerk read labour through a subjectivist lens, treating it as individual effort rather than as the social substance of value. Later Marxist writers, such as Ernest Mandel, accused critics of dialectical method of a "positivist narrowness", while defenders of the critique maintained that the problem lay in the value theory's foundations.
The transformation problem
The so-called transformation problem asks whether labour values can be converted into prices of production without breaking two identities that Marx appeared to want to keep: that total price equals total value, and that total profit equals total surplus value. In Volume III Marx argued that competition equalizes the rate of profit across sectors, so that individual prices depart from values while the totals remain linked. Whether this can be done consistently has been disputed ever since.
The most influential formal answer came from the Russian-Polish economist Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, whose 1907 article on correcting Marx's construction in Volume III argued that Marx's procedure left out constant and variable capital from the transformation. Bortkiewicz built a three-department model, separating means of production, wage goods and luxury goods, and showed that values and prices could be linked in a consistent way within a stationary system of simple reproduction. Critics such as Paul Mattick argued that this "solution" was a technical exercise that treated Marx as if he were writing a general-equilibrium theory, and that it depended on a static setting that did not reflect self-expanding capital. Paul Sweezy revived Bortkiewicz's argument in the 1940s, and the article was later published in English alongside Böhm-Bawerk's critique and Hilferding's reply. Some economists have since argued that Marx's own procedure, or a different definition of value, preserves both identities, while others maintain that they cannot generally hold together. Debates over the problem have produced several schools, including the Neo-Ricardian reading that identifies value with the consumption bundle of workers.
Popper and the critique of historicism
Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) presents Marx as a central figure in what Popper called historicism: the belief that history follows discoverable laws toward a predetermined end. Popper accepted that Marx's sympathy for the suffering of workers and his analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism were serious, but he argued that the claim of a scientific prophecy of capitalism's collapse and socialism's victory was unfounded. He also argued that social prediction can only be conditional, and that claims to foresee the course of history encourage utopian social engineering and a readiness to sacrifice present people for a promised future. Popper's own argument against historicism was developed further in The Poverty of Historicism, published separately in 1957. Critics of Popper, including many Marxists, have argued that he attacks a deterministic caricature of Marx that the texts do not fully support, because Marx also stressed contingency, class struggle and the role of political action.
The status of Marx's predictions remains disputed on empirical grounds as well. Forecasts of growing immiseration of the working class, the polarization of society into two classes, and proletarian revolution in advanced capitalist countries did not materialize in the form Marx described. Defenders reply that these were tendencies within capitalist development rather than fixed timetables, and that the wide spread of working-class living standards and welfare states in the twentieth century can be read as a response to pressures Marx identified. The debate is partly about whether Marx's theory is falsifiable in the sense that philosophers of science require.
Open questions for the present
Several questions remain open. The first concerns the state and democracy: the Communist Manifesto treats the state as an instrument of the ruling class, whereas The Eighteenth Brumaire allows for a state that acts with a degree of autonomy from any single class. Scholars continue to debate whether Marx's account of the state can support a theory of democratic politics, and how the Paris Commune and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat should be understood. The second concerns human agency: whether historical change is driven by the forces of production or by the choices of organized classes and individuals. The third concerns relevance. Analysts have used Marx's accounts of accumulation, crisis, wage bargaining and the reserve army of labour to discuss inequality, financialization, automation and global supply chains, but critics argue that these uses often separate Marx's concepts from the theory of value that gave them their meaning. Whether his framework still explains contemporary capitalism, or whether it needs substantial revision, is therefore still contested.
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