Karl Marx - In Short

Life
Marx is considered one of the greatest philosophers on the 19th century. Marx was born in an orthodox Jewish family which had a long chain of rabbis on both side. Later Marx converted to Christianity to penetrate in the German Middle Class. His father also became a Christian to save himself from the Nazi's persecution.

Work
The biography is deliberately kept short, because our focus is on his work rather than his life. Marx work can be understood as an evolutionary model. In fact, Marx was so inspired by Darwin that he once said, "I would like to dedicate my book(Das Kapital) to Darwin, if only he answers in affirmative". I guess Darwin never answered!
Marx theory works on the principal which is know as 'Dialectical Materialism'. Marx was a Hegelian. The idea of dialectics was created by Hegel. (This idea was also present in the Greek philosophy but it is ascribed to Hegel). The idea of Materialism is taken from Fuerbach.

Dialectics is a method of argument. In this method a person presents a thesis, an anti-thesis and lastly a synthesis. To understand this take an example. Person A says that due to industrialization comfort level are increasing, economy of scale is being reach, more efficiency, more time for leisure and better work-hour compared to the pre-industrial revolution. This is the thesis. Person B says that he disagrees. he says that through industrialization pollution has increased which leads to more diseases, unemployment has increased as machine are replacing human, life has become more like a robot as everything is meachanized. This is an anti-thesis. Now you read both of them and try to find out a middle way. This is called synthesis. Informally, when a thesis and anti-thesis collide a synthesis is created. This process is dynamic in nature. It never stops. This is because that every synthesis would later became a thesis which will again collide with some anti-thesis and make a synthesis.

Materialism is not a new concept. Matrialism says that the only thing which exsist is matter. There is no conception of soul. A man is simply a combination of flesh and blood and nothing else. There is nothing such as a duality of mind and body. A man works simply to fulfill the desires of his body and even his heart is a piece of flesh any nothing else. Marx basically points towards historical materialism.

Marx is of the views that it is economies which derive a human acts not ideologies. It is through money that man buys shelter, clothing and food. A man must work in some sort of economic paradigm to get these basic necessities. According to Marx, and other materialist, it is the man's act of acquiring money which leads to the formation of law and society.

When we combine both of these ideas we reach to the conclusion of 'dialectical materialism'. According to Marx, any social formation consists of two branches. This is the infrastructure and super-infrastrucutre. The super-infrastructure provide the ideology which drives a society. It provide the framework according to which the infrastructure would gain its characteristics.

The infrastructure includes the ways of production. This might include technology and labour.
The infrastructue basically leads to the creation of wealth and this is where dialectic comes into play.


According to Marx as there are two types of values(wealth). Captial value and labour value. As labour value tends to zero, this leads to a class war as rich become richer and poor become poorer. This causes a problem in the infrastruture which question the super-infrastructure. This clash between the two can be considered as a collision of thesis and anti-thesis. This infact results in a synthesis which leads towards a new social formation.