Few nineteenth-century thinkers cast a longer shadow over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than Karl Marx. Philosopher, economist, journalist and militant, Marx did not merely found a philosophical school: he supplied a vocabulary — class, ideology, surplus value, mode of production — that seeped into sociology, history, economics and cultural criticism, even among authors who reject him. This article focuses on three axes of his mature thought: historical materialism, the critique of political economy and the theory of ideology. Alienation, the central concept of the young Marx, is the subject of a separate study, and is mentioned here only where indispensable.

1. Context: a philosopher in exile

1.1 A life (1818–1883)

Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, in 1818, and died in London in 1883. He studied law and then philosophy, earning his doctorate in 1841 with a thesis on the philosophies of nature of Democritus and Epicurus. His intellectual formation took place in the heat of the Hegelian Left (the “Young Hegelians”), a group that radicalised Hegel’s philosophy in a critical direction, above all against religion and the Prussian state — Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and, decisively for Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach.

Marx’s career was marked by political exile. After his journalistic writings were censored in Prussia, he moved to Paris (1843–1845), where he struck up a lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels and came into direct contact with French socialism and English political economy. Expelled from France, he passed through Brussels (1845–1848) and, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, settled permanently in London (from 1849), where he lived in frequent poverty, partly sustained by Engels’s support, and where he studied political economy in the reading room of the British Museum.

1.2 The decisive works

Marx’s output is usually divided into a “young,” more philosophical phase and a “mature” phase centred on the critique of political economy. The principal landmarks are:

  • Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844, published only in 1932): the theory of alienated labour.
  • The German Ideology (1845–1846, with Engels; published posthumously): the first articulated formulation of historical materialism and the critique of ideology.
  • The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Engels): the concise political programme and the thesis of class struggle as the motor of history.
  • A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): whose famous Preface condenses the thesis that the base determines the superstructure.
  • Capital, vol. I (1867): the systematic analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Volumes II and III were edited by Engels from Marx’s manuscripts, in 1885 and 1894.

2. The inversion of Hegel: materialist dialectics

Marx inherits dialectics from Hegel — the conception of reality as process, driven by internal contradictions, in which each stage generates the conditions of its own supersession. But he rejects the Hegelian idealist foundation, according to which the motor of history is the unfolding of Spirit (Geist), an ideal reality.

The image is famous. In the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital (1873), Marx states that, in Hegel, the dialectic is “standing on its head” and must be “turned right side up again”: only thus can one discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. For Hegel, Marx says, the process of thinking is the demiurge of the real world; for him, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected and translated in the human mind. Dialectics remains the method, but its subject ceases to be the Idea and becomes the material process of the production and reproduction of social life.

This inversion owes much to Feuerbach, who had already “inverted” Hegel on the terrain of religion, arguing that it is not God who creates man, but man who projects his own essence onto God. Marx accepts the materialist gesture but criticises Feuerbach for remaining contemplative: in the 11th of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) he formulates the maxim that philosophers have only interpreted the world, whereas the point is to change it — the celebrated primacy of praxis.

3. Historical materialism

3.1 Productive forces and relations of production

Historical materialism starts from a simple premise: before doing philosophy, art or politics, human beings must produce the material means of their existence. The way a society produces is therefore the key to understanding it.

Marx distinguishes two components in production. The productive forces include the means of production (tools, machines, land, raw materials) and labour power with its knowledge and techniques. The relations of production are the social and legal bonds that organise that production — above all the property relations that define who controls the means of production and how the product is appropriated and distributed. Together, forces and relations of production make up a mode of production.

3.2 Base and superstructure

In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx offers the most condensed formulation of his thesis. The relations of production form the economic structure of society — the real base — upon which rises a legal, political and ideological superstructure, to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The famous sentence sums it up: it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

This thesis should be read without caricature. Taken mechanically, it would suggest that the economy directly produces ideas, making philosophy, law and art mere passive reflections. Engels himself, in letters of the 1890s (notably to Joseph Bloch, 1890), corrected this oversimplification: the base is determining “in the last instance,” but the superstructure reacts back upon it, and many factors interact in history. The relationship is one of conditioning and interaction, not of rigid, one-way causality.

3.3 Succession of modes of production and the motor of history

Marx sketches a historical sequence of modes of production — primitive community, Asiatic mode, ancient (slave-based), feudal and capitalist — with the caveat that this periodisation applies above all to Western Europe and is not a universal law of obligatory stages.

The motor of transformation is the contradiction between developing productive forces and relations of production that become a fetter. When the relations of production can no longer accommodate the growth of the productive forces, an epoch of social revolution opens. Under capitalism, this contradiction appears in the opposition between the increasingly social character of production and the private appropriation of its fruits — a tension that, for Marx, prepares the conditions for its own supersession.

4. Ideology and consciousness

The thesis that social being determines consciousness underpins the Marxian theory of ideology. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels describe the ruling ideas of an epoch as the ideas of the ruling class: the group that controls the means of material production also controls, in large measure, the means of intellectual production.

On this reading, ideology operates as inversion and concealment: it presents the particular interests of a class as universal, natural interests, and conceals the real relations of domination beneath apparently neutral ideas. Marx and Engels use the image of the camera obscura, in which real relations appear inverted, as in a photograph.

The phrase “false consciousness” — often attributed to Marx — in fact appears in Engels (letter to Franz Mehring, 1893), and its scope is debated. A more sophisticated reading does not treat ideology as mere lie or error to be dispelled by correct information, but as a socially necessary form of consciousness, rooted in the very structure of capitalist relations — which connects ideology to the theme of commodity fetishism, treated below.

5. The critique of political economy

5.1 The commodity: use value and exchange value

Capital opens with the analysis of the commodity, defined as the economic cell of bourgeois society. Every commodity has two faces. Use value is the usefulness of the object, its capacity to satisfy a need. Exchange value is the proportion in which one commodity exchanges for another. Marx asks what makes such different goods commensurable — and answers that the common denominator is the human labour expended in their production.

5.2 The labour theory of value

Inheriting and reworking Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx holds that the magnitude of a commodity’s value is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour required to produce it — that is, the labour time required under average conditions of productivity. It is not the labour of a slow, inefficient producer that determines value, but the prevailing social standard.

5.3 Surplus value and exploitation

At the centre of the analysis stands the concept of surplus value (Mehrwert). Under capitalism, the worker sells to the capitalist not his labour, but his labour power — his capacity to work — for a wage. The value of this labour power corresponds to what is needed to reproduce it (food, housing, training). But labour power has a singular property: when used, it produces more value than it costs. The difference between the value the worker creates and the value he receives as a wage is surplus value, appropriated by the capitalist. In this, for Marx, consists exploitation — not in the moral sense of mistreatment, but in the technical sense of the appropriation of unpaid surplus labour.

Marx distinguishes two strategies of extraction. Absolute surplus value increases surplus labour by lengthening the working day. Relative surplus value increases it by raising productivity — through technology and the organisation of labour — so that the time needed to reproduce the wage falls and surplus time grows, even without lengthening the day.

5.4 Commodity fetishism

The analysis of the commodity culminates in the section on fetishism. In a commodity economy, the social relations between producers take the form of relations between things: what is, in origin, a social relation between persons appears as a value relation between objects in the market. Value appears as a natural property of commodities, rather than as the crystallisation of human labour and of the social relations that organise it.

Marx borrows the term “fetish” from the study of religions — the idol to which a power of its own is ascribed. Just as, in religious fetishism, the products of the human mind appear endowed with autonomous life, in commodity fetishism the products of human labour appear to govern their own producers. Hence the “mystical” character of the commodity. This concept is the finest articulation of economy and ideology in Marx: ideological inversion is not a mere error of thought but is rooted in the very form of economic relations.

6. Class struggle, revolution and silence about the future

History, says the opening line of the Communist Manifesto, is the history of class struggles. Under capitalism, the fundamental opposition is between the bourgeoisie, owner of the means of production, and the proletariat, which possesses only its labour power. For Marx, the development of capitalist contradictions tends to concentrate property, to make labour precarious and to organise the proletariat — preparing the revolution that would abolish private ownership of the means of production.

It is important to note what Marx deliberately did not spell out. Hostile to what he called “utopian” socialism, he refused to draw up recipes for the future society. His indications about communism are sparse and cautious — as in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), where he distinguishes an initial phase, still marked by bourgeois right (“to each according to his labour”), from a higher phase associated with the formula “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Marx offers a critical analysis of capitalism, not a finished blueprint of an alternative society.

Critical assessment

Marx’s strength lies, above all, in the analytical power of his model: few theories have captured with such reach the dynamics of capitalism — its tendency toward global expansion, concentration, periodic crisis and ceaseless technological transformation. Even critics recognise in Capital one of the most ambitious attempts to understand economic modernity, and its interdisciplinary influence — in sociology, economic history, anthropology and literary criticism — is undeniable.

The serious objections, however, are equally important for the student. The labour theory of value was challenged by the marginalist revolution (Jevons, Menger, Walras) from the 1870s onward, which began to explain prices by marginal utility and by supply and demand, rather than by embodied labour. The so-called “transformation problem” — the passage from values to prices of production — fed a technical debate of more than a century (from Böhm-Bawerk to Bortkiewicz and the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy) over the internal consistency of the model.

Marx is also charged with economic determinism, although, as we have seen, Engels himself qualified the mechanistic reading. Several of his predictions did not come true as formulated: the growing absolute pauperisation of the proletariat, the total polarisation of society into two classes, and the inevitable collapse of capitalism in the most developed economies were not confirmed in the twentieth century, partly thanks to the welfare state and the rise of real wages.

Finally, there is the debate over totalitarianism. It is historically inaccurate to identify Marx with the regimes that claimed to be his heirs. State Marxism-Leninism — Soviet, later replicated in other countries — incorporated theoretical elements absent from or foreign to Marx, such as Lenin’s vanguard party, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” institutionalised as a one-party state, and Stalin’s central planning. Critics such as Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945) saw in Marxian historicism a source of authoritarianism; other interpreters rigorously distinguish Marx’s critical theory from the practices of the states that invoked his name. The student should maintain this distinction: judge Marx by his texts and by the coherence of his arguments, not by the later political appropriation.

Legacy

Twentieth-century Marxism unfolded into plural theoretical traditions, often in tension with one another. The Frankfurt School — Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse — developed a critical theory that combined Marx with psychoanalysis and the analysis of culture, shifting the focus from the economy to cultural domination and instrumental reason. The Italian Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, reformulated the base–superstructure relation through the concept of hegemony, emphasising the cultural dimension and consent in the maintenance of power.

In France, Louis Althusser proposed a “structuralist” reading, marked by the thesis of an “epistemological break” between the young humanist Marx and the scientific Marx of Capital, and by the notion of ideological state apparatuses. The Hungarian Georg Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), recovered the Hegelian dialectic and developed the concept of reification, an extension of commodity fetishism. Analytical Marxism, beginning with G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), subjected Marx’s theses to the rigour of Anglo-American analytic philosophy and rational choice theory.

Contemporary reception remains alive. After the financial crisis of 2008, authors such as David Harvey revived interest in the Marxian analysis of crises, and the success of works on inequality reopened, in new terms, questions Marx had posed. As a tool for the critique of capitalism — separate from any specific political agenda — Marx’s thought remains an unavoidable interlocutor for the human sciences.

  • Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I (1867).
  • Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).
  • Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) — with the Preface on base and superstructure.
  • Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845–1846).
  • Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
  • Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923).
  • G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978).
  • David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973) — the standard intellectual biography.

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