5 Key Tenets of Karl Marx

Why No German Revolution?

Given that critical theory stands in a Marxist line of thought, it is helpful to briefly summarize some of the key tenets of the thought of Karl Marx.¹ Marx lived through much of the revolutionary nineteenth century. A German by birth, he actually once considered entering the ministry. It should be kept in mind that when the Frankfurt School came into being (in the 1920s), Marx had died only some forty years prior. Grasping something of Marxism itself helps readers track with the inner logic of critical theory.

It should first be noted, as Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) writes, that “Karl Marx was a German philosopher.”² This is all the more important when we realize that Marx had thought (by 1875) that the revolution brought about by the proletariat would occur in “an industrial European nation, perhaps Germany.”³ When the revolution had still not happened in Germany by the time World War I ended—more than four decades after 1875—the critical theorists we are studying in this volume found themselves in something of a crisis. The simple question was why: Why had the revolution not occurred in Germany? To appreciate the dilemma this posed for the critical theorists, we need to take a brief look at some of the key tenets of Marx and Marxism.

Mankind

Perhaps the best place to start in grasping Marx’s thought is the centrality of man in social relationships. Marx was an heir of the thought of G. W. F. Hegel. To start with a simple comparison, if Hegel emphasized the importance of the spirit, immaterial, otherworldly, and abstract, Marx emphasized the importance of the economic, material, this-worldly, and concrete. Thus, Marx began with persons in relationship in the gritty, earthy here and now. Marx and Friedrich Engels said, “Consciousness is . . . from the very beginning a social product.”⁴ Or as William Dennison summarizes Marx on this point, “Humanity’s social existence determines humanity’s consciousness.”⁵ If one can grasp this insight, much of Marx can be more easily understood.

What Is Critical Theory?

Bradley G. Green

In this book, Bradley G. Green offers a thoughtful Christian analysis of critical theory, its key philosophers, and their views regarding creation and reality; sin and the human dilemma; and redemption, history, and eschatology.

Marx contended that what is central is man’s economic situation—rather than his abstract, “philosophical,” or religious insights, dogmas, propositions, or concerns. Similarly, what is central is the material world, particularly the material world as it is bound up with man’s economic situation—hence the emphasis in Marx on economic structures, the production of economic necessities, and who controls the means of production. For example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attacked what they called the “false conceptions,” or mankind’s “ideas of God, of normal man, etc.”⁶ Indeed, Marx and Engels wanted to liberate their readers from “the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings” of religion.⁷ And Marx and Engels took the earthiness and situatedness of things quite seriously. Indeed, one’s convictions, ideas, and philosophies ultimately simply flow from one’s particular (generally economic) situatedness.

So, man in his social and economic existence is central to Marx. But man’s consciousness is not simply shaped or influenced by his economic and social existence; it is a product of it.

Family and Property

For Marx, the first example of the division of labor is the man and woman in producing a child. Marx and Engels discussed the family under the rubric of “property.”⁸ Indeed, the wife and the children are “the slaves of the husband,” and “this latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property.”⁹ Because he viewed family through a property lens, Marx and Engels called for the “abolition of the family!” and for replacing “home” education with “social” education.¹⁰ Similarly, Marx and Engels were quite clear about the necessity of abolishing private property. They wrote, “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”¹¹ Marx and Engels were not, in one sense, against property ownership; they were opposed to private-property ownership. In his societal vision, private-property ownership must be abolished so that property might become the “common property” of “all members of society.”¹² As Marx and Engels saw it, this “common” ownership would lead to the inherent and intractable oppression that is endemic to private-property ownership.

Labor

Marx had something of an idiosyncratic understanding of work and labor, which are simply a part of the human situation. There is a flow to history, and in due course, the division of labor emerged. This is “natural,” but this “natural” situation—in which we experience the division of labor—is also an “alienating” one.¹³ Marx and Engels recounted three stages in the history of the division of labor.¹⁴ First, ownership comes into existence with “tribal ownership,” in which one sees the primacy of hunting, fishing, rearing of beasts, and eventually agriculture. Second, Marx and Engels turned to “the ancient communal and State ownership”—essentially a situation in which several tribes come together to form a larger unit. Private property develops during this stage. The third stage is that of feudalism, or “estate property,” which constitute geographically larger units, in which there are more uninhabited swaths of land—the country rather than the city is central.

A key problem emerges. This whole multistage development is understandable and “natural,” yet in this “natural” state of things, one no longer engages in “voluntary” activity but is now “enslaved” to work. And here one’s own labor is “alien” to oneself. My work is now “foreign” or “alien” to me, and this alienation flows from, or follows from, the historical development of the division of labor. Marx and Engels, at least here in The German Ideology, did not make clear why work that was prior to the “division of labor” was “voluntary” and why work that is after the “division of labor” “enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.”¹⁵ And here Marx and Engels waxed eloquent (but with confusion?) about what things were like before the various development stages of the division of labor occurred. He described the division of labor coming into being as follows:

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced on him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowherd, or critic.¹⁶

Communism

Let us also say a word about communism itself. For Marx and Engels, communism (the abolition of private property as well as the abolition of the division of labor) is good, proper, and inevitable. The economic forces and the economic situation of man proceed historically in such a way that communism will emerge. As Marx and Engels saw it, communism is “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”¹⁷ And the communist movement or revolution develops from within the present state of things; as Marx and Engels wrote, “The conditions of this movement result from the premisses now in existence.”¹⁸ For Marx and Engels, “it is a question of revolutionizing the existing world, or practically attacking and changing existing things.”¹⁹

Marx and Engels spoke eloquently about what happens when the revolution occurs. Perhaps counterintuitively, it is only with the (communist) revolution that the individual can become the individual he is supposed to be. Marx and Engels wrote of “the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations” in the communist revolution.²⁰ Whereas before the revolution labor became a kind of “enslavement” and “alienation,” with the revolution the worker can truly engage in “self-activity”—a kind of work that no longer alienates but benefits the self.²¹

Marx saw the communist revolution and society as that which springs from the interests of the individual, and he believed that the communist revolution and society best serve the individual.²² For example, Marx and Engels wrote that the communist society is “the only society in which the original and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase.”²³ Marx and Engels also wrote, “The individuals who rule in these conditions [when power is centralized in the State], besides having to constitute their power in the form of the State, have to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression as the will of the State.”²⁴ Likewise, people do not really “begin” with big ideas, abstractions, and so on; rather, “individuals have always started from themselves, and could not do otherwise.”²⁵

For the revolution to succeed, it must lead to what Marx called the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as he wrote in a letter in 1852.²⁶ So while the revolution—in one sense—is inevitable, as it is the result of deep historical and materialistic forces at work, it nonetheless requires human agency—even a dictatorship, at least for a while. In this same letter, Marx laid out a helpful summary of his thinking of the revolutionary process:

1. “The existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production.”

2. “The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

3. “This dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”²⁷

So classes emerge because of particular economic situations, the class struggle leads (necessarily) to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the end result is the abolition of classes and a classless society. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels worked this out a bit more. If all goes according to plan, the proletariat makes “itself the ruling class.”²⁸ In its revolutionary activity, the proletariat will “have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally” and “abolished its own supremacy as a class.”²⁹ In short, the revolutionary work of the proletariat makes the proletariat itself redundant or unnecessary—but there must be some phase of time during which a dictatorship of the proletariat will be necessary to get things in order.

Class and Class Struggle

Having highlighted the importance of individuals in Marx’s thought, we should briefly turn to Marx’s notion of class and class struggle. The opening lines of The Communist Manifesto (after a brief preamble) read, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”³⁰ This struggle is between “oppressor and oppressed,” and these have always been “in constant opposition to one another.”³¹ Whereas virtually all history testifies to some manifestation of this struggle, Marx’s own time, as he saw it, was unique. He and Engels claimed that this titanic struggle had been simplified into “two great hostile camps”: bourgeoisie (i.e., owners of the means of production, those with capital) and proletariat (i.e., the working class).³² So while Marx and Engels did indeed hold that the development of the “general will” and the like springs from individuals, they still affirmed a fundamental divide in society between two classes: oppressor and oppressed, bourgeoisie and proletariat.

This article is adapted from What Is Critical Theory?: A Concise Christian Analysis by Bradley G. Green.

Bradley G. Green (PhD, Baylor University) is professor of Philosophy and Christian Theology at the Southern Baptist Theoloical Seminary and cofounder of Augustine School, a Christian liberal arts school in Jackson, Tennessee. He is the author of The Gospel and the Mind and What Is Critical Theory? 

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