Karl Marx (study notes)

Born in Trier in 1818 from a wealty middle class family; lived in Cologne, Paris, Brussels and London; father converted from Judaism to Lutheranism

Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maois

Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it

Capitalism is expressed as land-ground rent, labor-wages, capital-interest/profits.

Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that religion had as its primary social aim the promotion of solidarity, here Marx sees the social function of religion in terms of highlighting/preserving political and economic status quo and inequality.

By "ideology", Marx and Engels meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which contemporaries see as universal and eternal.

For both Marx and Hegel, self-development begins with an experience of internal alienation stemming from this recognition, followed by a realisation that the actual self, as a subjective agent, renders its potential counterpart an object to be apprehended.

Marx described this loss as commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Engels.

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894); some of his works were co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels.