Karl Marx

A Summary of his works:

Using Hegelian philosophy, English economics and French politics, Marx sets out to create the ultimate communist society. His dialectic materialism takes the contradictions of thought, namely a thesis and antithesis and forms a “higher truth” called a synthesis, which becomes the new thesis. It is now combined with an antithesis, which again produces a synthesis, which again becomes a new thesis. The process continues until the ultimate “truth” is found. In this way, according to Marx, we will eventually attain the perfect state, free of class struggle. “It is the return of man himself as a social [being],” writes Marx.

The enemy to communism is capitalism with its division of labor and its division of the classes into property owners and property-less workers. Marx describes how the laborer is separated from the products he creates, his labor-power and from nature. He is alienated from his potential to become a universal being and master the universe. Abolishing capitalism will require that private property, religion, family and classical education are abolished and replaced by “free, conscious, creative social activity, in which man is not dominated by need, envy, or the desire to possess.” (Eugene Kamenka)

Marx predicts that the proletariat will rise up against the bourgeoisie and overthrow the state, as was the attempt during the French Revolution, but that it would not fail as in the French Revolution. He feels that no leader could liberate the proletariat, but the proletariat itself; nor could any ideology replace the theological understanding or the empirical insight of the perfect society, communism.