HCJ Lecture Four Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a journalist. He was editor of Rheinische Zeitung in 1841 and London correspondant of the New York Tribune in the 1850s. Marx acheieved a fusion of Hegelian philosphy, British empiricism and French revolutionary politics accordings to Engels.
He was an economist who made economics central to the understanding of human life and the motive power of history. For Aristotle man is the rational animal, for Plato the poltical animal, for Kant the moral animal, for Hegel the historic animal. For Marx, man is the productive animal and mankind creates the environment it inhabits.

His method was scientific-everything based on the masses of evidence that were being collected for the first time by the British state such as information on taxation, demographics and commodity prices.
'The Young Hegelians'-Feuerbach-God is created in the image of man; and the garden of eden is a real place, like an ideal society. Marx's thesis on Feuerbach was the world will not evolve naturally towards a perfect society because men must be able to create the perfect society themselves. He uses a basically Hegelian system to criticise "mechanistic materialism" which he describes as not science, but as "bourgouise ideology".

In the German Ideology-the Young Hegelians and liberals are ridiculed. There are no natural rights because there is no Hegelian-type built-in progression in history. But, Hegel is right about dialectical change-the dialectic is the way history unfolds (thesis-antithesis-synthesis)
The proletariat, says Marx, is the "universal class". Because of te dynamics of the capitalist economy, all men will eventually be pauperised and forced down into the proletariat because of the law of capital concentration.

THESIS=the bourgouise (free market capitalism, liberal state, individual rights)
ANTITHESIS=the proletariat
SYNTHESIS=Socialism

Definition of Socialism for Marx is also objective-it is social ownership of the means of production. Socialism as a political system can only be established by "proletarian revolution". After a proletarian revolution, the state will be 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'- it will be used to communalise all the means of production. When that is achieved, a system of communism will be achieved.
In 1843, Marx published a critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Like everyone else, he complained about the complexity of Hegel's writing; but liked the key idea of dialectical change and the teleological progression towards a perfect society.
In the preface to the Critique of Political Economy-Karl Marx says that eternal universal laws such as universal declaration of Human Rights are not universal.

Religion is only 'ideology' and 'mysticism'-it is the ideology of a feudal society because it justifies the "Our Lord" and reproduces in the cultural sphere the irrational authority of the feudal social system, culminating in the divine right of kings. Religion is rejected by the empiricists and economists (Smith, Hume, Ricardo) because they have the contending ideology of natural laws and natural rights. Marx says of religion that it is "the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless times, the opium of the people"