Who Was Karl Marx, and What Were His Philosophies?

the nineteenth century. His meditations on how societies work and how they should work have informed and challenged humans for more than a hundred and fifty years. Yet to the uninitiated, Marks maybe only a bushy, mugged symbol of revolution, the father of communism, the hater of capitalism. He's considered by many, especially in the West, as the man whose ideas spurred

authoritarian communist regimes in Russia, China and beyond. That again is selling the man short, because it's not entirely right. In his book Karl Marks, a nineteenth Century Life, author Jonathan Sperber wrote, viewed positively, Marx is a far seeing profit of social and economic developments and an advocate of the emanspiratory transformation of state and society. From a negative viewpoint, Marx is one of those most responsible for the pernicious

and evil features of the modern world. If nothing else, Marx was a keen observer of the human condition. He was a deep thinker with bold ideas about how to make life better. We spoke with Lawrence Dollman, who teaches a course on mars and philosophy at the University of Chicago and is the co author of a chapter on Marx and Marxism in the Rootledge Handbook of Philosophy and Relativism. Dolman said Marx himself was first and foremost a kind

of scientist. He was a student of reality, but he himself struggled throughout the course of his career how exactly to put his ideas to politics. It's important to note that despite his one time lofty standing what was then the Soviet Union. Marx was born in Treer in the Kingdom of Prussia in eighteen eighteen. That's what's now known as the Rhineland area of western Germany. After the failed German Revolution of eighteen forty eight, Marx fled to London,

where he eventually died in eighteen eighty three. He's buried beneath a large tomb in London's Highgate Cemetery inscribed with the words Workers of All Lands Unite. But Mars grew up privileged, the son of well off and liberal parents in an ancient town that had been wrapped for decades before his birth by war and revolution. That upheaval, cultural, religious, and political shaped his parents and was a big part

of young Marx's upbringing. Later, Mars attended universities studying law and philosophy, where he became engaged to and later married, a Prussian baroness. It was while studying philosophy in law that Marx was introduced to the works of German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas he used to later form his take on communism. Marx began a career as a journalist in his early twenties, writing for radical newspapers

in Cologne and Paris. Throughout he consorted with other liberal minded philosophers, and by his mid twenties met and collaborated with one of the major influences in his life, freed Rich Angles. It was Angles who convinced Marx that society's working class would be the instrument to fuel revolutions and bring about a more fair and just society. In eighteen forty eight, the two published a pamphlet that would be the basis for a new political movement, the Communist Manifesto.

In eighteen eighty three, after Marx's death, Angles summed up the main idea in the Communist Manifesto like this quote, that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch, necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the

political and intellectual history of that epoch. That consequently, ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land, all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting between dominated and dominating classes

at various stages of social evolution. That this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class, the proletariat, can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it, the bourgeoisie, without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression class struggles. Dolman explained, Marx was always concerned to understand the real underlying causes of social phenomenon, the events

and institutions that kind of shape the social world. Marx wanted to kind of dig down beneath the appearances and see what was really going on. Early on in his career he thought that the best arena to do that in was philosophy, and then as time went on he transitioned more into the social sciences. What's most important about Mars is that he very much had a kind of engineering mentality about society. He wanted to know what makes it work, and how if we want to change it,

do we change it? What are the levers that we have to pull. Marx's eighty seven economics work capital a critique of political economy, a takedown of capitalism that decried the exploitation of the working class, crystallized a debate one that continues today between the West's ruling social and economic theory capitalism and Marx's idea of communism. Too many. It's a fight that hits rich versus poor, bourgeois e versus proletariat, ruling class versus workers. And it's even more than that.

To those who debate it, it's right versus wrong, an argument about the best path to a perfect society. But that, of course is very simplistic and doesn't get Marx's thinking right. Dallman said, above all else, the association that people have with Marx is that he's some utopian pie in the sky dreaming of a perfect world that is free of all the nastiness we live in now. Really, that couldn't be further from the truth. Marx had a kind of

engineering mindset. He was probably, of all the major figures in the history of political thought, the most practical, the most realistic. He was the most concerned with what is really possible in the real world. What marks to find

as communism but boiled down. A society that produces goods only for human need, not for profit, and in which there is no master slave, royalty, peasants, owner worker relationship and therefore no need to overthrow anybody certainly clashes with the materialism of capitalism, but it's a long way from what many today see as communism too. After the Russian Revolution of nineteen seventeen and later under Joseph Stalin's reign, some of Marx's ideas, along with those of Vladimir Lenin,

were used to build a New Empire. Millions were killed along the way. Similarly, millions died in China under the rule of Malzadom's Communist Party. Dolman acknowledged it's hard to even talk about what Marks thought of communism without dragging in all the weight from Soviet Russia and communist China, and obviously a lot of people hold Marks responsible for that. Authoritarian rules like Stalins and Maus were not what Marx had in mind. It's important to note, too, that Marx

did not hate capitalism. He actually saw some virtue in the system. He saw it as a necessary precursor to communism, and he envisioned some of the technological challenges automation unseating workers, for example, that are true today. Doloman explained, Mars was very impressed with the kind of progressive character of capitalism.

By forcing people from all different walks of life into the same workplaces, capitalism kind of breaks down the old divides between communities, and so things like race and gender and religion divide people less. The more people are forced to see each other as equals in the workplace. Marks recognized and marveled the economical and technological growth the capitalism begets and saw it as an improvement from previous societies.

Later in life, Dolman says Mark suggested that a growth in capitalism might be a way to move toward communism instead of all out revolution, but he still saw communism

with no master slave dynamic as the end goal. In that way and in others, Marx's idea of communism was far from the atrocities that have been committed in the name of communism elsewhere, and his ideas are still, perhaps strangely too many a beacon in a search for a better way of life, in that this practical and deep thinker of the nineteenth century still has relevance in today's world.

Dolman said, Mars was so committed to giving a kind of rational criticism of everything, not just the enemy, but to himself and everything. He was willing to criticize the old modes of life and show how capitalism kind of improved on them. But he was also willing to criticize capitalism and show how we could foresee the improvement coming in the future. That is still a hopeful vision. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang.

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