Name : -

ARZ MOHAMMAD

Teacher's name :-
SIR MOHAMMAD ASIF

Topic name :-
KARL MARX

History Department University of Balochistan Quetta .

KARL MARX .

Biography of Marx :-
Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher,
economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Born in Trier to a
middle-class family, he later studied political economy and Hegelian philosophy.
For a general review of Karl Marx biographies it is good to read by complete data
to visit books and internet .
 Born in Trier , Germany, to a Jewish middle-class family, Marx studied law
and philosophy at university. Due to his political publications, Marx became
stateless and lived in exile in London for decades, where he continued to develop
his thought in collaboration with German thinker
Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the
British Museum . His best-known titles are the 1848
pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto , and the three-volume Das Kapital. His
political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent
intellectual, economic and political history and his name has been used as an
adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.
Major Works of Marx :-

The design of the product and how it is produced are determined, not by the
producers who make it the workers, nor by the consumers of the product the
buyers, but by the capitalist class who besides accommodating the worker's
manual labour also accommodate the intellectual labour of the
engineer and the industrial designer who create the product in order to shape the
taste of the consumer to buy the goods and services at a price that yields a
maximal profit. Aside from the workers having no control over the design and
production protocol, alienation Entfremdung broadly describes the conversion of
labour work as an activity, which is performed to generate a use value the
product into a commodity, which like products can be assigned an exchange
value. That is, the capitalist gains control of the manual and intellectual workers
and the benefits of their labour, with a system of industrial production that
converts said labour into concrete products goods and services that benefit the
consumer.

Karl Marx's theory of alienation :- describes the estrangement Entfremdung

of people from aspects of their Gattungswesen "species-essence" as a
consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes . The alienation from
the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the
condition of which estranges a person from their humanity.
The theoretic basis of alienation within the
capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to
determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think conceive of
themselves as the director of their own actions to determine the character of said
actions to define relationships with other people. and to own those items of value
from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is
an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is
directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the
bourgeoisie who own the means of production
in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the
course of business competition among industrialists.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1932), Karl Marx
expressed the
Entfremdung theory of estrangement from the self. Philosophically, the theory of
Entfremdung relies upon The Essence of Christianity (1841) by Ludwig
Feuerbach which states that the idea of a supernatural god has alienated the
natural characteristics of the human being . Moreover,
Max Stirner extended Feuerbach's analysis in
The Ego and its Own (1845) that even the idea of "humanity" is an alienating
concept for individuals to intellectually consider in its full philosophic implication.
Marx and Friedrich Engels responded to these philosophic propositions in The
German Ideology .
Importance of Marxism currently :-
In the capitalist mode of production , the generation of products goods and
services is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive
motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for a job well done
.By means of commodification , the labor power of the worker is reduced to
wages an exchange value the psychological estrangement Entfremdung of the
worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labor and the
wages paid to him for the labor. The worker is alienated from the means of
production via two forms wage compulsion and the imposed production content.
The worker is bound to unwanted labour as a means of survival, labour is not
voluntary but coerced forced labor . The worker is only able to reject wage
compulsion at the expense of their life and that of their family. The distribution of
private property in the hands of wealth owners, combined with government
enforced taxes compel workers to labor. In a capitalist world, our means of
survival is based on monetary exchange, therefore we have no other choice than
to sell our labour power and consequently be bound to the demands of the
capitalist. The worker does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely
his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The
worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside
himself labor is external to the worker. it is not a part of their essential being.
During work, the worker is miserable, unhappy and drained of their energy, work
mortifies his body and ruins his mind . The production content, direction and form
are imposed by the capitalist. The worker is being controlled and told what to do
since they do not own the means of production they have no say in production,
labor is external to the worker, it does not belong to his essential being . A
person's mind should be free and conscious, instead it is controlled and directed
by the capitalist, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact
that it is not his own but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it
he belongs, not to himself, but to another . This means he cannot freely and
spontaneously create according to his own directive as labor's form and direction
belong to someone else.
Commensalism / manifesto :-
 The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning
the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles .It also briefly features
their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced
by socialism. Near the end of the Manifesto, the authors call for forcible
overthrow of all existing social conditions , which served as the justification for all
communist revolutions around the world.
The Communist Manifesto is divided into a preamble and four sections, the
last of these a short conclusion. The introduction begins by proclaiming A
spectre is haunting Europe the spectre of communism. All the powers of old
Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre . Pointing out
that parties everywhere including those in government and those in the
opposition have flung the branding reproach of communism at each other, the
authors infer from this that the powers that beacknowledge communism to be a
power in itself. Subsequently, the introduction exhorts Communists to openly
publish their views and aims, to meet this nursery tale of the spectre of
communism with a manifesto of the party itself . Marxist Philosophy :-
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly
influenced by
Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists . Marxist
philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew out of
various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a
rigid reading of Marx called
dialectical materialism , in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a
strictly defined sub field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist
theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics ,
ethics , ontology , epistemology , theoretical psychology and philosophy of
science , as well as its obvious influence on political philosophy and the
philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its
materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought.
Marxist theorist Louis Althusser , for example, defined philosophy as class
struggle in theory ,thus radically separating himself from those who claimed
philosophers could adopt a God's eye view as a purely neutral judge.
Nonetheless, the force of Marx's opposition to
Hegelian idealism and to any "philosophy" divorced from political practice
remains powerful even to a contemporary reader. Marxist and Marx-influenced
20th century theory, such as to name a few random examples the critical theory
of the Frankfurt School , the political writing of Antonio Gramsci , and the neo-
Marxism of Fredric Jameson , must take Marx's condemnation of philosophy into
account, but many such thinkers also feel a strong need to remedy the perceived
theoretical problems with orthodox Marxism.
Such problems might include a too-simple
economic determinism , an untenable theory of
ideology as "false consciousness , or a simplistic model of state power rather
than
hegemony . So Marxist philosophy must continue to take account of advances in
the theory of politics developed after Marx, but it must also be wary of a descent
into
theoreticism or the temptations of idealism.
Étienne Balibar claimed that if one philosopher could be called a Marxist
philosopher . that one would doubtlessly be Louis Althusser .
Marx and Revolutions :-

Permanent revolution is a term within Marxist

theory, coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by at least 1850 but which has
since become most closely associated with Leon Trotsky . The uses of the term
by different theorists are not identical. Marx used it to describe the strategy of a
revolutionary class to continue to pursue its class interests independently and
without compromise, despite overtures for political alliances, and despite the
political dominance of opposing sections of society.
Trotsky put forward his conception of "permanent revolution" as an explanation of
how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that had not achieved advanced
capitalism . Trotsky's theory also argues, first, that the bourgeoisie in late
developing capitalist countries are incapable of developing the
productive forces in such a manner as to achieve the sort of advanced capitalism
which will fully develop an industrial proletariat . Second, that the proletariat can
and must, therefore, seize social, economic, and political power, leading an
alliance with the peasantry.
Socialism and Marx :-

By the late 19th century, after the work of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich
Engels , socialism had come to signify opposition to capitalism and advocacy for
a post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership of the means of
production. By the 1920s, social democracy and
communism had become the two dominant political tendencies within the
international socialist movement. By this time, socialism emerged as the most
influential secular movement of the twentieth century, worldwide. It is a political
ideology or world view a wide and divided political movement" and while the
emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally socialist state led to
socialism's widespread association with the
Soviet economic model , some economists and intellectuals argued that in
practice the model functioned as a form of state capitalism or a non-planned
administrative or
command economy . Socialist parties and ideas remain a political force with
varying degrees of power and influence on all continents, heading national
governments in many countries around the world. Today, some socialists have
also adopted the causes of other social movements, such as environmentalism ,
feminism and progressivism .
The term "socialism" was created by Henri de Saint-Simon , one of the
founders of what would later be labelled "utopian socialism". Simon coined the
term as a contrast to the liberal doctrine of "individualism ", which stressed that
people act or should act as if they are in isolation from one another. The original
"utopian" socialists condemned liberal individualism for failing to address social
concerns during the industrial revolution, including poverty, social oppression and
gross inequalities in wealth, thus viewing liberal individualism as degenerating
society into supporting selfish egoism that harmed community life through
promoting a society based on competition.
Historical Philosophy of Marx :-
Historical materialism is the methodological approach of Marxist
historiography that focuses on human societies and their development over time,
claiming that they follow a number of observable tendencies. This was first
articulated by Karl Marx as the materialist conception of history . It is principally
a theory of
history according to which the material conditions of a society's way of producing
and reproducing the means of human existence or, in Marxist terms, the union of
its technological and productive capacity and social relations of production ,
fundamentally determine society's organization and development.
Historical materialism . looks for the causes of developments and changes in
human society in the means by which humans collectively produce the
necessities of life. It posits that social classes and the relationship between them,
along with the political structures and ways of thinking in society, are founded on
and reflect contemporary economic activity.
Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded by Marxist
writers. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants. Marxists contest that
historical materialism is a scientific approach to the study of history.
While Marx never used the words "historical materialism" to describe his theory
of history, it nevertheless first appears in Friedrich Engels ' 1880 work Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific to which Marx wrote an introduction for the French edition.
By 1892, Friedrich Engels indicated that he accepted the broader usage of the
term historical materialism, writing in an introduction to Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific;
Marx's initial interest in materialism is evident in
his doctoral thesis , which compared the philosophical atomism of Democritus
with the
materialist philosophy of Epicurus , as well as his close reading of Adam Smith
and other writers in classical political economy .
A caricature of Max Stirner drawn by Friedrich Engels. Stirner's 1844 work
The Unique and its Property prompted Marx to theorize a scientific approach to
the study of history, which he first laid out in The German Ideology (1845) along
with a lengthy rebuttal of Stirner's work.
Marx and Engels first state and detail their materialist conception of history within
the pages of The German Ideology , written in 1845. The book, which structural
Marxists such as Louis Althusser [9] regard as Marx's first 'mature' work, is a
lengthy polemic against Marx and Engels' fellow Young Hegelians and
contemporaries
Ludwig Feuerbach , Bruno Bauer , and Max Stirner. Stirner's 1844 work The
Unique and its Property had a particularly strong impact on the worldview of Marx
and Engels: Stirner's blistering critique of morality and whole-hearted embrace of
egoism prompted the pair to formulate a conception of socialism along lines of
self-interest rather than simple humanism alone, grounding that conception in the
scientific study of history.
Perhaps Marx's clearest formulation of historical materialism resides in the
preface to his 1859 book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy :
Continued development
In a foreword to his essay Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy (1886), three years after Marx's death, Engels claimed confidently
that "the Marxist world outlook has found representatives far beyond the
boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary languages of the
world." [13] Indeed, in the years after Marx and Engels deaths, historical
materialism was identified as a distinct philosophical doctrine and was
subsequently elaborated upon and systematized by Orthodox Marxist and
Marxist-Leninist thinkers such as
Eduard Bernstein , Karl Kautsky , Georgi Plekhanov and Nikolai Bukharin . This
occurred despite the fact that many of Marx's earlier works on historical
materialism, including The German Ideology ,
In the Marxian view, human history is like a river. From any given vantage point,
a river looks much the same day after day. But actually it is constantly flowing
and changing, crumbling its banks, widening and deepening its channel. The
water seen one day is never the same as that seen the next. Some of it is
constantly being evaporated and drawn up, to return as rain. From year to year
these changes may be scarcely perceptible. But one day, when the banks are
thoroughly weakened and the rains long and heavy, the river floods, bursts its
banks, and may take a new course. This represents the dialectical part of Marx's
famous theory of
dialectical .
Materialism & Capitalism
This understanding counters the notion that human history is simply a series
of accidents, either without any underlying cause or caused by supernatural
beings or forces exerting their will on society. Historical materialism posits that
history is made as a result of struggle between different social classes rooted in
the underlying economic base. upuplishment of a unified economy and of a world
market. National personal autonomy
Determinist presumption towards a socialist future
In his analysis of the movement of history, Marx predicted the breakdown of
capitalism, and the establishment in time of a communist society in which class-
based human conflict would be overcome. The means of production would be
held in the common ownership and used for the common good. In the mention of
"human liberation" one should not neglect that, in the level of production, the
working class is the most oppressed. citation needed But either way, in the
prediction of the future, one shall first know of the past (e.g., the establishment of
capitalism, and the transitional part of feudalism
Warnings against misuse
See also: Economic determinism
Marx himself took care to indicate that he was only proposing a guideline to
historical research and was not providing any substantive theory of history or
grand philosophy of history , let alone a master key to history. Engels expresed
irritation with dilettante academics who sought to knock up their skimpy historical
knowledge as quickly as possible into some grand theoretical system that would
explain everything about history. He opined that historical materialism and the
theory of modes of production was being used as an excuse for not studying
history.
In the 1872 Preface to the French edition of Das Kapital Vol. 1, Marx also
emphasized that There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not
dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous
summits . Reaching a scientific understanding was hard work. Conscientious,
painstaking research was required, instead of philosophical speculation and
unwarranted, sweeping generalizations.
But having abandoned abstract philosophical speculation in his youth, Marx
himself showed great reluctance during the rest of his life about offering any
generalities or universal truths about human existence or human history. The first
explicit and systematic summary of the materialist interpretation of history
published, Anti duhring , was written by Friedrich Engels.
One of the aims of Engels's polemic Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science
(written with Marx's approval) was to ridicule the easy "world schematism" of
philosophers, who invented the latest wisdom from behind their writing desks.
Towards the end of his life, in 1877, Marx wrote a letter to the editor of the
Russian paper
Otetchestvennye Zapisky , which significantly contained the following disclaimer:
Marx goes on to illustrate how the same factors can in different historical
contexts produce very different results, so that quick and easy generalizations
are not really possible. To indicate how seriously Marx took research, when he
died, his estate contained several cubic metres of Russian statistical publications
it was, as the old Marx observed, in Russia that his ideas gained most influence.
But what is true is that insofar as Marx and Engels regarded historical processes
as law-governed processes, the possible future directions of historical
development were to a great extent
limited and conditioned by what happened before. Retrospectively, historical
processes could be understood to have happened by necessity in certain ways
and not others, and to some extent at least, the most likely variants of the future
could be specified on the basis of careful study of the known facts.
Towards the end of his life, Engels commented several times about the abuse of
historical materialism.
In a letter to Conrad Schmidt dated 5 August 1890, he stated:
Finally, in a letter to Franz Mehring dated 14 July 1893, Engels stated:
Criticisms
Philosopher of science Karl Popper , in The Poverty of Historicism and
Conjectures and Refutations, critiqued such claims of the explanatory power or
valid application of historical materialism by arguing that it could explain or
explain away any fact brought before it, making it unfalsifiable and thus
pseudoscientific . Similar arguments were brought by Leszek Kołakowski in Main
Currents of Marxism .
Political theory of Marx :-
According to Marxist theory, class conflict arises in capitalist societies due to
contradictions between the material interests of the oppressed proletariat a class
of wage labourers employed to produce goods and services and the bourgeoisie
the ruling class that owns the means of production and extract their wealth
through appropriation of the
surplus product produced by the proletariat.
This class struggle that is commonly expressed as the revolt of a society's
productive forces against its relations of production , results in a period of short-
term crises as the bourgeoisie struggle to manage the intensifying alienation of
labor experienced by the proletariat, albeit with varying degrees of class
consciousness . This crisis culminates in a proletarian revolution and eventually
leads to the establishment of
socialism a socioeconomic system based on
social ownership of the means of production,
distribution based on one's contribution and
production organized directly for use. As the productive forces continued to
advance, Marx hypothesized that socialism would ultimately transform into a
communist society ; a classless, stateless, humane society based on common
ownership and the underlying principle: "From each according to his ability, to
each according to his needs ".
Marxism has developed into many different branches and schools of thought,
though now there is no single definitive Marxist theory. Different Marxian schools
place a greater emphasis on certain aspects of classical Marxism while rejecting
or modifying other aspects. Many schools of thought have sought to combine
Marxian concepts and non-Marxian concepts, which has then led to contradictory
conclusions. However, lately there is movement toward the recognition that
historical materialism and dialectical materialism remains the fundamental aspect
of all Marxist schools of thought, which should result in more agreement
between different schools.
Marxism has had a profound and influential impact on global academia and has
expanded into many fields such as archaeology ,
anthropology ,media studies , political science , theater , history, sociology , art
history
and theory, cultural studies , education ,
economics, ethics , criminology , geography ,
literary criticism , aesthetics , film theory, critical psychology and philosophy .

Referencea

Popper, Karl (2002). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific

Knowledge . Routledge .

SM. C. Howard and J. E. King, 1992, A History of Marxian Economics: Volume II,
1929–1990 . Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press.

Syed Alaudeen , Stefun law 2017 ' Azeem philosphers ' 2016-17 City book point
urdu bazar karachi .

Asad patafi , Elain Wooderz ' Marxism ' " Aiad Hazir ka wahid sach " 2017 . Lal
salam publishers , 10 Abait abad road , Lahore .

Marx , Lenain , Engals ' Mirza ishfaq baig .' " Jadlyaati madeat " 2014 . Book time
karachi , Urdu bazar karachi .