Few thinkers have shaped the modern world as much as Karl Marx (1818 to 1883). Governments, revolutions, labor movements, academic fields and everyday words like "capitalism" and "class struggle" all carry his mark. Whatever you conclude about his ideas, you cannot understand the last two centuries without them.

A short life

Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, to a middle-class family. He studied law and then philosophy at Bonn and Berlin, where he joined the Young Hegelians, a circle of radical students who used the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's ideas to criticize religion and the Prussian state. Hegel taught that history develops through conflict and resolution, a process later called dialectic. Marx kept the idea of history moving through conflict but argued that its driving force was material life, not ideas.

Blocked from an academic career, Marx became a journalist. His newspaper was shut down by the authorities, and he lived most of his adult life in exile: Paris, Brussels, and from 1849 London, where he spent decades in the British Museum reading room researching economics. He and his family were often poor, and several of his children died young.

Engels

Marx's lifelong collaborator was Friedrich Engels (1820 to 1895), the son of a German textile manufacturer who managed a family mill in Manchester. Engels' book The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) described the slums, disease and long hours of early industrial cities. Engels co-wrote several works with Marx, supported him financially, and after Marx's death edited and published volumes two and three of Capital.

The world they saw

Marx wrote during the Industrial Revolution. Factories were drawing millions of people off the land into crowded cities. Children worked in mills and mines. Workdays of twelve hours or more were common, and there was little protection for workers who were injured or laid off. At the same time, productive power was growing faster than ever in human history. Marx was struck by both facts at once: capitalism was producing enormous wealth, and the people producing it often lived in poverty.

Key works

• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844): early notes on alienated labor, published only in 1932.
• The German Ideology (1845 to 1846, with Engels): the first full statement of historical materialism.
• Theses on Feuerbach (1845): eleven short notes, ending with the famous line, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
• The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Engels): a short, fiery pamphlet written for a workers' organization, the Communist League. It ends, “Workers of the world, unite!”
• Capital, volume one (1867): Marx's detailed analysis of how capitalism works. Volumes two (1885) and three (1894) were edited from his notes by Engels.
• Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875): one of the few places Marx described what a communist society might look like.

Philosophy that aims at change

The line from the Theses on Feuerbach captures what makes Marx unusual. He saw himself not only as describing society but as providing a tool for the people who would transform it. That is why Marxism became both an academic theory and a political movement, and why debates about it so often mix questions of fact (is this how capitalism works?) with questions of value (is it just?) and strategy (what should be done?). Keeping those three kinds of question apart is one of the most useful habits you can bring to this course.

A note on approach

This course presents Marx's ideas as a careful Marxist would present them, then sets out the strongest criticisms. Understanding an idea well enough to explain it fairly is the first step to judging it.

Worked example: reading Marx in context

Imagine a Manchester cotton mill in 1845, the year Engels published his study of the city. A spinner works fourteen hours a day, six days a week. Children as young as eight tend machines and crawl under them to tie broken threads. Wages barely cover rent in a damp cellar and a diet of bread and potatoes. Cholera moves through the neighborhood every few years. Meanwhile the mill owner's output has multiplied many times over what hand spinners could produce a generation earlier.

A defender of the system at the time might say: wages are freely agreed, the mill offers work that did not exist before, and growth will eventually lift everyone. A reformer might say: pass laws to limit hours and ban child labor, and keep the system. Marx asked a deeper question: what is it about the way production is organized that produces this combination of wealth and misery, and could it be organized differently?

Keep this scene in mind through the course. Each later level is, in part, Marx's attempt to answer that question.