Реферат: Karl Marx

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Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany, in 1818. After schooling in Tier he

entered Bonn University but soon moved to Berlin on his father's request.

There he was introduced to G.W.F.Hegel, the professor of philosophy. Marx was

especially impressed by Hegel's theory that a thing or thought could not be

separated from its opposite. For example, the slave could not exist without

his master and vice versa.

After his father's death in 1838, Marx tried journalism in order to earn his own

living. His radical political views meant that most editors were unwilling to

publish his articles, though. Marx moved to Cologne, where he soon was

appointed editor of The Rheinish Gazette, and then to Paris, where he

was offered the post of editor of a new political journal, Franco-German

Annals. Among the contributors of the journal was the radical son of a

wealthy German industrialist, Friedrich Engels. In Paris Marx began mixing with

members of the working class for the first time. Marx, who now described

himself as a communist, argued that the working class (the proletariat), would

eventually be the emancipators of society.

In 1845 Marx received an order deporting him from France. Marx and Engels,

who had now become his close friend, decided to move to Belgium, a country

that permitted greater freedom of expression than any other European state.

Marx spent his time trying to understand the workings of capitalist society,

the factors governing the process of history and how the proletariat could

help bring about a socialist revolution. Unlike previous philosophers, Marx

was not only interested in discovering the truth. As he was to write later,

in the past "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;

the point is to change it".

In 1846 Marx set up a Communist Correspondence Committee. The aims of the

organization were "the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the domination of the

proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society based on class

antagonisms, and the establishment of a new society without classes and without

private property". Marx's work, The Communist Manifesto, summarized the

forthcoming revolution and the nature of the communist society that would be

established by proletariat. After The Communist Manifesto was published

in 1848, the government expelled Marx from Belgium.

Marx's excitement about the possibility of world revolution began to subside in

1849. The army had managed to help the Emperor of Austria return to power and

attempts at uprisings in Dresden, Baden and the Rhur were put down. Marx now

went to Paris where he believed a socialist revolution was likely to take place

at any time. However, within a month of arriving, the French police ordered him

out of the capital. Only one country remained who would take him, and on the 15

th September he sailed to England.

With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme

poverty. But despite all his problems Marx continued to work and spent most of

the time in the reading room of the British Museum, where he read the back

numbers of The Economist and the other books and journals that would

help him analyze capitalist system.

In 1867 the first volume of Das Kapital was published. A detailed

analysis of capitalism, the book dealt with important concepts such as surplus

value (the notion that a worker receives only the exchange-value, not the

use-value, of his labour); division of labour (where workers become a "mere

appendage of the machine") and the industrial reserve army (the theory that

capitalism create unemployment as a mean of keeping the workers in check).

In the final part of Das Kapital Marx deals with the issue of

revolution. Marx argued that the laws of capitalism would bring about its

destruction. Capitalist competition would lead to a diminishing number of

monopoly capitalists, while at the same time, the misery and oppression of the

proletariat would increase. Marx claimed that as a class, the proletariat would

gradually become "disciplined, united and organized by the very mechanism of

the process of capitalist production" and eventually would overthrow the system

that is the cause of their suffering.

Karl Marx died on the 14th March, 1883.