Karl Marx

1818-1883 · German · Critique of Political Economy, Historical Materialism, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Theory of Ideology

The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.

Expelled from Germany, then Belgium, then France, Karl Marx spent the last thirty-four years of his life in London — much of it in poverty, sustained by Engels's factory income and a manuscript he could not finish. He had come to political economy through Hegel and then set Hegel back on his feet: grounding the movement of history not in spirit but in the material conditions of production.

Topics Karl Marx addresses

• historical materialism
• base and superstructure
• mode of production
• relations of production
• forces of production
• class struggle
• the labor theory of value
• surplus-value
• alienation
• commodity fetishism
• species-being
• the bourgeoisie and proletariat
• exploitation
• use-value and exchange-value
• socially necessary labor-time
• absolute and relative surplus-value
• primitive accumulation
• the falling rate of profit
• the organic composition of capital
• the reserve army of labor
• the contradictions of capitalism
• crisis theory
• ideology and false consciousness
• the dictatorship of the proletariat

Converse with Karl Marx on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Karl Marx's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.