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Karl Marx: Philosophy
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Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism (controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that human history is characterized by the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was ... a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed slavery in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would eliminate it from their civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet.
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Marx argued that Hegel's dialectic was upside down. Instead of being based in human knowledge, the dialectical contradictions were based in human social reality. For Marx, the contradiction between subject and object in philosophy was a reflection of the actual contradiction between workers and employers under capitalism. The difference between the ideal spirit and reality translates into Marx's view that man had become alienated from his true nature. Man had been created different from animals: he is creative, this is essential to his nature. However, in modern days, man is just automatically producing: he works to earn his wage, but has no tie to the product of his labor at all.
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When his mentor Bauer was dismissed from the philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned philosophy for journalism and went on to edit the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical Cologne newspaper. After the newspaper was later shut in 1843, in part due to Marx's conflicts with government censors, Marx returned to philosophy, turned to political activism, and worked as a freelance journalist. Marx soon moved... something he would have to do often as a result of his radical views.
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Marx's sociological insights (especially the importance of alienation in industrial society) are alive and central to political sociology. His economics, which he regarded as his most important work, is dead except to a few devotees. Most economic analysts agree that the Marxian labour theory of value, including of surplus value, cannot be rescued from its internal contradictions. Marx's historical materialism remains an influential approach to both history and philosophy. His work on French politics combines insight with invective, and destruction of myths with their creation, in a way that will continue to fascinate readers for generations to come.
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After Marx's death, the idealistic visions of Marxism were transformed by Vladimir Lenin into Leninism, and this in turn was used by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to create their own political philosophies. In the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident Marxists created a school that espoused the ideas of critical theory (unrelated to Critical philosophy), railing against many of those who supposedly followed Marx's ideas.
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How does Marx deal with the obvious objections to communism: that it abolishes privacy and private property, individuality, freedom, motivation to work, education, marriage, family, culture, nations, religion and philosophy? He does not deny that communism abolishes these things, but says that capitalism has already done so. For example, he argues that “the bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.” On the most sensitive and important issues, family and religion, he offers rhetoric rather than logic; for example: “The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation between parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting....” And here is his “answer” to religious and philosophical objections: “The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint are not deserving of serious examination.”
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