2. Where Marx’s philosophy came from

Marx, with the assistance of his friend Frederick Engels, developed the main lines of his philosophy when he was very young, in his mid-twenties, and in a very short space of time between 1843 and 1846. It was a truly astonishing achievement. What made it possible?

Part of the answer, of course, is that he built on the work of other great philosophers and thinkers of his time and of the past. Most obviously he drew on and synthesised the tradition of German classical philosophy, above all G W F Hegel and his critic Ludwig Feuerbach*; the tradition of French political thought deriving from the French Revolution, particularly the so-called utopian socialists Fourier and Saint-Simon; and the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo developed in Britain.

But while Marx openly acknowledged and paid tribute to all these influences he did not simply take over their ideas. Nor did he just draw them together. The new synthesis he created was based on a profound critique and transformation of his source materials. Thus from Smith and Ricardo he took the labour theory of value which stated that the value of commodities was determined by the amount of labour required in their production. But whereas for Smith and Ricardo this theory was used to support the “productive” industrial bourgeoisie against the “unproductive” landed aristocracy, Marx, by applying it to the commodity of labour power, turned it into an exposure of the exploitation of the working class inherent in capitalist production. While for the utopian socialists, socialism was a noble rational ideal which they hoped to persuade the ruling class to accept, for Marx it was the necessary outcome of the working class’s struggle for power. And, most importantly for our focus on philosophy, he took over dialectics from Hegel but, under the influence of Feuerbach, put it on a materialist foundation, while also transforming Feuerbach’s rather passive materialism into a philosophy of human action. (The terms “materialism” and “dialectics” are explained in chapters 4 and 5.)

Marx was able to achieve this theoretical revolution not only because of his exceptional intellectual powers but also because he had discovered a new vantage point from which to examine all questions of philosophy and social theory – this was the standpoint of the working class.

Adopting the standpoint of the working class, which Marx did in 1843-44, meant much more than just sympathising with the plight of the workers (though there is much evidence in Marx’s writing that he was deeply moved and outraged by the suffering of working people at the hands of the bourgeoisie). It meant grasping the power of the working class, its revolutionary potential to overthrow capitalism (see the section on class struggle in chapter 3). It meant seeing the working class not just as the agent, the foot soldiers, of the revolution but as its subject and directing element, in other words seeing the emancipation of the working class as the act of the working class itself. It meant understanding that in liberating itself the working class would also open the door to the liberation of humanity as a whole.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. (K Marx and F Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in D McLellan, ed, as above, p230)

It also meant that as a philosopher and as a theorist, Marx had to make the social position of the working class, its condition of life, its interests and its struggle the starting point for both his political programme and for his analysis of capitalism, history and philosophy. This Marx did, and this was why he repeatedly described himself and Engels as “theoreticians of the proletariat” (see for example, K Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in D McLellan, ed, as above, p212).

But Marx was only able to do this, to break with his middle class background and take the side of the working class, because the working class movement had already begun to make its appearance on the historical stage. For Marx as an individual three experiences were crucial. The first was mixing in communist worker circles in Paris in the second half of 1843. The second was the influence of Engels who had been working at his father’s firm in Manchester and also reported to Marx on his involvement with the Chartists, the world’s first independent mass workers’ movement. The third was the revolt of the Silesian weavers who rose against their severe impoverishment in June 1844 and profoundly inspired Marx.

Thus it is no accident that Marxism was developed in the 1840s in north western Europe. This was where and when the industrial revolution was occurring and the modern working class was starting to flex its muscles. Marxism was the theoretical generalisation of working class struggle.

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* G W F Hegel (1770-1831) was inspired by the French Revolution and developed a philosophical system which saw the whole of history as a dialectical development of ideas. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), a German philosopher of the next generation, developed a materialist critique of both religion and Hegel.