Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, political economist, journalist, and revolutionary, whose critique of political economy is the load-bearing reference-point for the modern theory of capitalism. He studied at Bonn, Berlin, and Jena (where he completed his doctorate on Democritus and Epicurus, 1841), worked as a journalist in Cologne and Paris, was expelled from successive cities for his political activity, and settled in London from 1849 until his death.

¶Core ideas

• Labor / labor-power. Capitalism rests on the distinction between labor (the activity itself) and labor-power (the capacity to labor as a commodity). The wage pays the cost of reproducing labor-power; the value created by labor exceeds that cost. The gap is surplus-value.
• Surplus-value and exploitation. Capitalist profit is the structurally extracted gap between value-created and wages-paid. Not theft in any individual sense — the structural form of the wage relation.
• The four registers of alienation. Under capitalism, the worker is alienated from the product of their labor, from the activity of laboring, from species-being, and from other workers (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844).
• Historical materialism. History is the history of changing modes of production; political and ideological formations are conditioned by their material substrate; class struggle is the engine of historical change.
• Primitive accumulation. The wage relation rests on prior violence — the enclosure of common lands, the dispossession of peasants, the slave trade — that created the propertyless workforce capitalism requires.

¶Key works

• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (written 1844; published 1932)
• The German Ideology (with Engels, written 1845-46; published 1932)
• The Communist Manifesto (with Engels, 1848)
• A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
• Capital, Volume 1 (1867); Volumes 2 and 3 (posthumous, ed. Engels, 1885 and 1894)
• Grundrisse (written 1857-58; published 1939, widely read post-1953)

¶Where his work figures in this library

Marx is foundational across labor, surplus-value, alienation, primitive-accumulation, and the entire marxism subdomain. Federici, Tronti/Negri, Gramsci, and Coulthard each extend or argue with the Marxian framework.