Who Was Karl Marx? A Journalist in the British Museum Reading Room

Born in Trier in the Rhineland in 1818 to a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism for professional reasons, he studied law and then philosophy, completing a doctorate on Greek atomism. Academic work was closed to him because of his politics, so he turned to journalism, editing a liberal paper in Cologne until the Prussian authorities shut it in 1843. Exile followed: Paris, where he met Friedrich Engels and began a collaboration that lasted forty years, Brussels, where the two wrote the Communist Manifesto for a small group of German artisans just before the revolutions of 1848, and finally London in 1849, where he stayed for the rest of his life. The family lived in two rooms in Soho for years and three of his six children died young, of conditions that poverty made worse. He earned what he could as European correspondent for the New York Tribune, and Engels sent money continuously. He died in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in front of about eleven people.

His starting point is a reversal of the philosophy he was trained in. Hegel had presented history as the development of ideas working themselves out over time; Marx argued that the causation runs the other way, and that the way a society organises production, who owns the land, the tools and the factories, and who must sell their labour to survive, determines its politics, its law, its religion and what its members find it natural to believe. He called the productive arrangements the base and the rest the superstructure, and the claim is that when the base changes the superstructure follows. History then appears as a sequence of modes of production, each generating the conflict that ends it, so that feudalism produced the merchants and manufacturers who dismantled it, and industrial capitalism, on his account, was producing the working class that would do the same to it.

Capital, the first volume of which appeared in 1867, is an analysis of the system rather than a programme, and several of its arguments have outlived the political movement:

• •Labour theory of value, inherited from Ricardo and Smith, holding that the value of a commodity reflects the socially necessary labour time to produce it
• •Surplus value, his central claim: a worker sells a day's labour power for a wage covering their subsistence, but produces more value than that in the day, and the difference is the source of profit
• •Alienation, the condition of a worker with no control over what is made, how it is made, or what becomes of it, separated from the product, the process, other people and their own capacities
• •Commodity fetishism, the way relationships between people come to appear as relationships between things with prices
• •The tendency to concentration, in which competition drives firms to grow, absorb rivals and accumulate, so that capital pools in fewer hands
• •Recurrent crises of overproduction, in which the system periodically produces more than can be sold at a profit and destroys capacity
• •A reserve army of the unemployed, whose existence holds wages down

The predictions fared worse than the diagnosis. He expected the condition of workers in industrial countries to deteriorate steadily, and it improved substantially, through unionisation, universal suffrage, factory legislation and rising productivity, none of which his model gave much weight to. He expected revolution in the most industrially advanced countries, Britain and Germany, and it came instead in agrarian Russia and then China, in conditions his own theory said were not ready. He expected the middle class to be squeezed out of existence, and it grew. The labour theory of value was abandoned by economics within two decades of his death in favour of marginal analysis, which explains prices better. And he wrote almost nothing about what a post-capitalist society would look like or how it would be administered, a silence his followers filled with material of their own, which is part of how the twentieth century produced regimes in his name whose methods have no basis in anything he wrote.

The influence outside politics is larger than most people assume and is often invisible because it has been absorbed. The idea that economic structure shapes culture, law and ideology is now a basic assumption across history, sociology and anthropology, whether or not anyone cites him; the practice of reading a text for whose interests it serves is his method generalised. Sociology as a discipline treats him as one of its three founders alongside Durkheim and Weber. Economists who reject his framework use his description of business cycles, concentration and technological unemployment. Schumpeter, no sympathiser, called him a great economist. And the concrete political demands of the Manifesto, which read as revolutionary in 1848, include free universal education, a progressive income tax and the abolition of child labour, all of which are ordinary features of every rich country. The reasonable summary is that his account of how capitalism works has worn much better than his account of where it was going.

The Rhineland journalist exiled to London in 1849 argued that the way a society organises production determines its politics, law and beliefs, and that each economic order generates the conflict that ends it. His analysis of capitalism turned on surplus value, the gap between what a worker is paid and what their labour produces, along with alienation, concentration of capital and recurrent crises of overproduction. His predictions about worsening conditions and revolution in the most advanced countries failed, while his method of reading culture through economic interest became standard across the social sciences.