Terrell Carver, "Marx and Marxism" (Summary)

Karl Marx believed that academic philosophers were too little engaged with social questions and that philosophy as a profession would never engage properly with the politics of thoroughgoing social change. His interpretation of some of his works as philosophical or stating philosophical doctrines developed in his later lifetime, and was the work of Friedrich Engels, his lifelong friend and occasional collaborator. After Engels's death, Marxism emerged as a comprehensive philosophy and political practice through which many of the twentieth century's most important social and economic transformations were envisioned and pursued.

Marx's early life has almost always been read as more aligned with reason than with faith, although his parents were not radicals. His father encouraged him to study at university, first at Bonn and then at Berlin, to become a lawyer. However, open confrontations with the truths that were the bedrock of Christian faith had to be avoided, and atheism or skepticism that would question the tenets and position of Christianity was an obvious ground for exclusion and dismissal in universities and the professions.

Historicization, a methodological thread in "free-thinking," was derived from the late eighteenth century through German scholars' research into ancient civilizations and languages. Both Strauss and Feuerbach proposed versions of philosophy that would effectively transcend confessional Christianity, at least for the educated classes where free-thinking had the wherewithal to flourish. Friedrich von Schelling was appointed to the Berlin Academy in 1841 to deradicalize the Hegelian legacy and discourage radicalism among "Young Hegelians."

Karl Marx, a prominent German philosopher and journalist, participated in the '48 revolutions in central Europe and emigrated to England in 1849. He worked as a journalist and publicist for working-class political struggles worldwide. In his autobiography, written in 1859, Marx presents himself as a social critic and political activist, rather than a philosopher. He began his account with an allusion to some of the few articles he wrote and published in his time as a liberal journalist on the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette), a legal and moderate paper in Cologne.

Marx's engagement with Hegel is framed as a detailed critique of the latter's political philosophy as such, allied to a critique of his overall dialectic as a general method. Marx's critical use of Hegel was not a simple reversal or inversion, but rather a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of law.

Marx's political perspective on change and reform was more radical and thoroughgoing than any adopted by political economists. He believed that mere redistribution of goods and services would not resolve the social question of inequality. Marx's engagement with any philosophy as such was secondary to or explicitly in aid of his chosen political project, a politically motivated critique of political economy.

Nineteenth-century socialism and communism were not consistently distinguished from each other, but they comprised a wide variety of views on human nature, ideal societies, and political tactics. Communists, such as Marx, were generally more radical in focusing on working-class politics and calling for large-scale, revolutionary change, using violence if necessary.

Marx's analysis of society, society, and politics is complex, focusing on the relationship between humans and their relationships, such as property and work relations. He links economic and political structures to the technologies and practices through which production occurs, referring to this as a real foundation. Marx believes that ideological generalizations are misleading and selectively tendentious rather than enlightening.

Marx's outlook on history, society, and politics is summarized by asserting that the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. He suggests four epochs in history: ancient, Asiatic, feudal, and modern bourgeois society. Changes in social formations have arisen from conflicts between productive forces and productive relations, particularly when the property system restricts technological and workplace developments that enhance productivity and innovation. Marx believes that Bourgeois society will be under pressure from similar contradictions as increasing productivity reduces employment and consumption, and the dysfunctionality of a market system based on "private" ownership becomes evident.

Marx's manuscript works of 1845-46, which were first published in part in the 1920s, have attracted the attentions of philosophers to an increasing and now dominant degree. Engels, a prominent publicist of Marx, worked to make him visible and gain political capital by making him a philosopher. Influential works of the late 1870s and early 1880s, particularly Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1878), were derived from unpublished notebooks and manuscripts and produced with suitable flourishes by a Russo-German team of Marxist scholars anxious to link Marxism with scientific certainty.

Marxist philosophy was initially marginalized by professional philosophers and regarded with suspicion due to its purported political commitment to revolutionary transformation of society. The Frankfurt School, established in the 1930s, made early use of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and German Ideology, which had not been incorporated by Engels into his Marxist dialectics and materialism.

Marxist philosophers in France and the Soviet Union applied Marxian notions of social production, class structure, and ideological critique to cultural criticism, social science, and historical research. Antonio Gramsci, a Communist Party worker in Italy, argued against materialism of matter-in-motion and instead favored a "praxis" account where intersubjective categories of practical life and cultural understanding constitute the human realm for political judgments. This approach to Marxism has been influenced by philosophers and activists throughout history, including Hegel, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lefebvre.

Postwar international political and economic settlements led to a significant shift in philosophy practice and promotion. Marxist philosophers' political commitment and interest in Marx's "theory of history" became respectable, though not universally accepted. The continental tradition in philosophy admitted Marx and his historicizing and Hegelianizing successors, but not the dialectics and materialism promoted by Engels.

In the postwar period, Marx was re-read independently of Engels's systematizing materialism and determinism, but in a more Hegelian manner. New texts, such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology manuscripts of 1845–46, were suited to the construction of Marx's work as a philosophy.

The philosophical "new Marx" was somewhat depoliticized in the postwar period, with philosophers excited by Marx's terminology of alienation, estrangement, species-being, and other humanist ways of setting out his concerns.

The analytical school of Marxist thought, initiated in the mid-1970s by G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer, Robert Brenner, and Erik Olin Wright, rejected Hegelianism and the continental tradition as methodologically unrigorous. Instead, rigor was identified with various presuppositions and methodologies, such as individualism, propositional hypothesis, and clarity in language. Marx's role in the philosophical debate was to resolve two significant puzzles: the validity of his "guiding principle" and the validity of his theory of exploitation. Analytical Marxists argued that Marx could be shown to be right after all, while Roemer and others adopted strict assumptions from economic modeling and game theory.

The "Marx and justice" controversy of the later 1970s and early 1980s involved a wide range of Marx's texts, reflecting the increased availability and respectability of standard and collected texts of Marx and Engels. Marx praised Hegel for presenting basic human social institutions as historically varied, malleable, and developmental, but criticized Hegel for a teleology of progress and his view that human life and change were all ultimately a matter of ideas. Marx countered that the universal human subject was the proletarian or homo faber, "man the worker," who collectively would produce the most decisive change in human history.

Hegel's dialectic is difficult to summarize, but Marx found it stimulating and useful as a mode of critical thinking founded on assumptions of change and development. Marx's twentieth-century reception of him follows Engels' general outlines, which include materialism, idealism, and dialectic. However, Marx's work has been rejected by postmodernists within the continental tradition of philosophizing, who focus on historicizing the categories of consciousness through which human experience is intersubjectively constructed and producing language-centered accounts of meaning and communication.

The classic critique of both positions is that of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which counterpose Gramsci's flexible and contingent constructions of cultural power to alternative readings of Marx, including Gramsci's own. Marx's intellectual and political trajectory from 1842 was toward the social question of class power and oppression, and his historical works appear as investigative and exploratory, drawing out contradictions between events as he understood them and his own generalizing theories.

Marx's relationship to philosophy and any continental tradition is highly problematic at the outset, although there are affinites with other antiphilosophical philosophies, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Marx was disinclined to find certainties in the commonplace antiskeptical small change of ordinary life, as he argued that these are areas of mystification where political power accumulates in the hands of the hands. His writings that are taken to be of most philosophical interest were themselves produced as an antiphilosophy, yet they were written in the terms through which certain philosophies were articulated at the time.