Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the German philosopher and economist whose theory of class struggle became the most consequential political doctrine of the modern age. With Friedrich Engels he wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848); his Capital (1867) supplied the movement’s economic system.¹

For conservatives Marx is the arch-ideologue: the thinker who reduced civilization to economics, declared war on property, family, religion, and nation, and licensed the total states of the twentieth century. Engaging him seriously remains a conservative obligation, because his heirs never left the field.

Key Takeaways

• Born in Trier on 5 May 1818, Marx edited the Rheinische Zeitung, was expelled from Prussia, France, and Belgium in turn, and settled in London in 1849, working in the British Museum until his death on 14 March 1883.
• His core doctrines are historical materialism, the labour theory of value, surplus value as the measure of exploitation, and revolution issuing in a classless society.
• Conservative critics from Böhm-Bawerk to Kolakowski and Sowell attack the economics as internally contradictory, the philosophy of history as secular prophecy, and the politics as a warrant for tyranny.
• Regimes claiming Marx’s authority ruled roughly a third of mankind by 1980; their record of famine, terror, and economic failure is central to the conservative verdict on the doctrine.

History And Context

Marx was born to a Jewish family recently converted to Lutheranism in the Prussian Rhineland. He studied law at Bonn and philosophy at Berlin, where he absorbed and inverted Hegel, taking his doctorate at Jena in 1841. Radical journalism led to serial exile: Paris in 1843, where he met Friedrich Engels in 1844 and began the partnership that financed and completed his work; Brussels in 1845; London from 1849 until his death. In the 1850s he supported his family partly as a European correspondent for the New-York Tribune, while income from Engels’s family cotton firm in Manchester kept the household afloat. The Communist League commissioned the Manifesto, published in London in February 1848 on the eve of that year’s revolutions.¹ After the revolutions failed, Marx turned to political economy, producing A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and the first volume of Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1867); Engels assembled volumes two and three from manuscripts after Marx’s death. From 1864 Marx dominated the International Working Men’s Association, feuding with Bakunin’s anarchists until the organization broke apart. He died stateless in London and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. Within four decades of his death, Lenin’s seizure of power in 1917 had turned the doctrine into a state.

The Conservative Position

The conservative indictment proceeds on three levels. Economically, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk argued in 1896 that the third volume of Capital contradicts the first: the promised transformation of labour values into market prices fails, and with it the claim that profit is theft.² Thomas Sowell, in his study of the system, judged its predictions, the immiseration of workers, the disappearance of the middle class, revolution in the advanced economies, to have failed in every particular.³ Philosophically, conservatives read historical materialism as prophecy in scientific dress. Leszek Kolakowski’s three-volume examination concluded that Stalinism was not a betrayal of the doctrine but one legitimate reading of it, since a theory that promises the end of human alienation through the total transformation of society carries its terror in embryo.⁴ Politically, Marx embodies the ideologue as Burke had described the type in the French Revolution: inherited institutions, family, faith, nation, property, are unmasked as instruments of exploitation, which clears the ground for reconstruction by force. The ledger of the states built on the system, from the collectivization famines to the Cultural Revolution, closes the case for most conservatives: doctrines that abolish the permanent things end by abolishing people.

Differing Positions

Marx’s defenders separate the analyst from the regimes. His account of capitalism’s dynamism, concentration, globalization, and crisis cycles is credited by scholars far from the left, and categories he named, commodification, alienation, remain standard diagnostic tools. Social democrats trace their lineage through the revisionist Eduard Bernstein and argue that the mature Marx endorsed universal suffrage, factory legislation, and free education, not terror. Humanist readers built on the 1844 manuscripts to recover an ethical Marx concerned with human flourishing under industrial conditions. On this view Leninism grafted Russian conspiratorial politics onto a European theory, and blaming Marx for the Gulag is like blaming the Gospels for the Inquisition. Recent biographers, Jonathan Sperber (2013) and Gareth Stedman Jones (2016) among them, press a further deflation: Marx was a nineteenth-century figure answering nineteenth-century conditions, not a prophet for ours. The conservative reply, that the doctrine’s totalizing logic invited its totalitarian use, keeps the argument alive rather than settling it.

References

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (London, 1848).
2. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898).
3. Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (New York: William Morrow, 1985).
4. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P. S. Falla, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).