Ethical Communication: Moral Stances in Human Dialogue

25. Karl Marx: Transcending Alienation

180 Karl Marx Transcending Alienation Jon Bekken Perhaps the most influential social thinker of the nineteenth century , Karl Marx (1818–1883) was born into an era of social ferment. The age of industrialization was underway, creating both enormous fortunes and widespread privation across Europe. A new social stratum of intellectuals, professionals, and other educated men formed an emerging public sphere, challenging existing traditions in every domain. The Enlightenment revolutionized philosophy with its celebration of reason and progress. Popular demands for democratization and rationalization challenged monarchical power across Europe, ultimately leading to the formation of the modern nation state and the emergence of civil society as a countervailing power. Marx was both a product of and a participant in this social ferment, and remains one of the most influential philosophers and social critics of all time. The son of a moderately prosperous Jewish lawyer who was forced to convert to the state church when Prussia annexed the Rhineland, Karl Marx studied philosophy and law at the Universities of Berlin and Jena. When his radicalism made a career as an academic impossible , Marx became editor of a new liberal newspaper in Cologne, a center of German radicalism. When it was suppressed in 1843, Marx and his new wife were forced into exile. He briefly returned to Cologne during the 1848 revolution to edit the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, was tried for sedition when royal authority was reestablished, and was expelled from the country after his acquittal. Marx would spend the rest of his life in exile, mostly in England. 25 .   181 Karl Marx Aside from his writings for the New York Tribune and other newspapers , which afforded at best a meager livelihood, Marx spent the remainder of his life developing his critique of capitalism, and working to build an international socialist movement that rejected more utopian traditions in favor of what he saw as a sound, scientific approach. Influential but also controversial in radical circles, Marx played a key role in the rise of the International Workingmen’s Association—an association of European unionists and socialists that sought to develop workers’ solidarity and coordination across the capitalist world—and also in the political conflicts that led to its demise in 1876. Marx is perhaps best known for his argument that the history of human society was, at root, the history of class struggle, and that this struggle (fueled by the contradictions intrinsic to the prevailing economic and social order) must necessarily culminate in a working-class revolution that would ultimately bring about the end of class-divided society and enable all humans to realize their full potential. Marx’s theoretical writings such as his three-volume Capital and The German Ideology (the latter, like much of his work, published after his death) were taken up by a new generation as the socialist movement entered the main currents of political debate in the early twentieth century. Marx’s ideas remain central to economic , philosophical, and political analysis today. But as his ideas have been more widely taken up, they have also been recast in ways often difficult to reconcile with Marx’s own approach. While Marx is often characterized as a rather vulgar materialist, he always placed great emphasis upon the importance of ideas. In an 1842 article in his newspaper, he wrote that “practical attempts, even mass attempts, can be answered by cannon as soon as they become dangerous, whereas ideas . . . to which reason has fettered our conscience, are chains from which one cannot free oneself without a broken heart” (Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 220–21). And it was upon the terrain of ideas that Marx took up his struggle . Marx served the German radical cause as a journalist. While Marx’s contemporary and rival Mikhail Bakunin rushed from barricade to barricade as Europe was convulsed by rebellions, spending much of his life in prison as a result, Marx issued pamphlets and manifestos from exile during the events, and analyses afterwards. While critiquing those for whom philosophy and history were mere 182 . Jon Bekken efforts to interpret the world—the point, he insisted, was to transform it—Marx focused his efforts on developing and disseminating a radical critique that could foreground and heighten the contradictions intrinsic to modern society and inform the nascent socialist movement in its struggles. Although Marx did not believe ideas or determination alone could transform society—men make history, he famously remarked, but not in...