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Karl Marx: Life
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Karl Heinrich Marx was a nineteenth-century German intellectual whose works have had great influence on the world. Largely ignored during his lifetime, Marx's writings on economics, politics, social science, and revolution eventually led to the founding of two political movements, socialism and Communism. In addition, his views have influenced many legal philosophers.
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Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labor power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labor — one's capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people.
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Marx spent most of his life in England working on Das Kapital (Capital). The first volume was published in 1867, the second and third volumes after his death. He considered Das Kapital to be his major work, because it described the functioning of industrial capitalism. Marx saw capitalism as an efficient way of producing wealth, but ... saw a fatal flaw in how this wealth was distributed: those who owned the means of production retained most of the wealth, whereas the working class had to get by on fluctuating wages. Marx argued that this inequality would eventually lead the working class to revolt.
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KARL MARX (1818-1883) was an insensitive man -- he was not that concerned about the feelings of those individuals with whom he came in contact. The majority of men, he thought, were either fools or sycophants. His public attitude was over-bearing, offensive and unyielding. But, within his circle of friends and family, he was quite intimate. Here, in the bosom of his family, Marx was secure, happy, considerate and generous. It is odd that throughout his entire life Marx remained an isolated figure among other revolutionaries of the period.
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Marx applied Hegelianism to all of society and life especially to oppose dogmatic religious, political and economic claims. He believed that society can only move forward through dialectical reasoning. Of course, this ultimately leaves no place for ultimate truth.
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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. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. In Germany, in his
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