Marx on Class.
'The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-alienation. But the former class finds in this self alienation its confirmation and its good, its own power...the class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self alienation, it sees in its own powerlessness...'This extract is taken from Karl Marx, The Holy Family (1845). It was written at a time of upheaval in Karl Marx's life. Just after he was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung at Cologne in 1842. He worked there until his extreme radical views led to the suppression of the paper, and Marx went to Paris, where he met Engels and collaborated with him in works of political philosophy. Engels was a (German philosopher) the son of a factory owner who, went on to supervised his father's business in Manchester and wrote influential essays on the social and political conditions in Britain in the 1840s, including The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), that influenced Marx's work on class at the time. Other influences at the time would have been Feuerbach on whom he wrote a thesis on in 1845. Feuerbach had a materialistic out look on history. He held to the philosophical theory that only physical matter is
This extract gives us a view point which must be consider in thinking about the validity and usefulness of Marx's theory of history. The word class was the unit into which people were divided. Marx believed this would be overcome in the future as ' at a certain stage of their development the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. Marx's view of contemporary society lay in his criticism of the accumulation of capital and the ways in which it drew people apart from one another. Popper's view was that there was an 'irrationality and danger. ' This comment made by Adolph Hitler showed that some were able to take the economic points which Marx made onboard and not only draw from his revolutionary views. We have to remember that some of the interpretations haven't been so eccentric; 'It goes without saying that only a planned economy can make full use of a nation's resources. 'This idea of materialism in sociology was in itself a piece of genius. in the doctrines of philosophers like Hegel and Marx' . Also Hegel, Marx also based his theory of dialectical materialism on Hegel's work such as The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), which describes the progression of the human mind from consciousness through self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion to absolute knowledge although he later then rejected aspects of the philosophy claiming it was to abstract. With this it is easy to see why a lot of negativity is attached to Marx. real and that all phenomena and processes can be explained by reference to it.
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