Karl Marx

Marx was an economist and therefore less interested in philosophy. He came up with the theory of 'wages, prices and profits', and the labour theory of value. He sees economy as the motivation for the development of society throughout history; man is the productive creature. Aristotle sees man as the rational animal, one who can use reason and logic. Plato sees man as the political animal. Kant considers man to be moral; knowing the difference between right and wrong while Hegel saw men as historical animals constantly considering the past and predicting the future.

Frederick Engels was Karl Marx's co-writer and they claimed that their methods were in fact scientific. Marx takes from Hegel, the idea that humans are on a journey; from feudalism to liberalism or capitalism. Marx admired Hegel but used him negatively to analyse the mechanistic materialism or empiricism; the idea of God being a clockmaker in conjunction with Newton. Locke and Hume. People respond to what stimulates them, utilitarianism avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Marx however doesn't agree with this wanting instead to be rid of 'mysticism'. He said 'I am not a Marxist', he didn't like his ideas being taken by socialists.

John Locke was an avid materialist and Marx likes to differentiate himself from this, he states that humans do not begin with a blank slate or tabula rasa, that instead, situations and created by men and men must be educated for them.

Marx does agree with perpetual and dialectical change, taken from Hegel. In the Communist Manifesto Marx looks at history and the struggle of the classes, taking the Hegelian dialectical system of a starting point or thesis, the opposition to this; anti thesis and the battle between these two, the synthesis. He uses this method to understand class struggle (the bourgeois and the proletarians).

In history the state has actually been what provides one class being against or more powerful than another or in other examples, caught in the struggle too. In the French Revolutions the pheasant got rid of their monarchy but then didnt have the political power to rule themselves; hence the Napoleon dictatorship. There are many stories of the struggle between the bourgeois, the owners of production (banking, factories, farms, land) and the proletarians (not to be mistaken for pheasants) who had no properly, status, freedom. They sell their labour and have to buy everything they need from the bourgeoisie . They have a right to things but not the means to every achieve them. They are a class fighting against the bourgeois for the state. The proletariat, because they have nothing to lose, are the people and don't have ideas of nationalism which causes war, so they could rule with much success; an international class with a good work ethic.

The proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the most revolutionary class of the nineteenth century. They had legal rights, but these don't count because they had no means of production. Private property is very different to something that can go onto produce other things which is capital (eg. a farm that sells milks, making money and investing as opposed to a pet cow called Daisy). Means of production in feudal society were owned by the state, the King and aristocrats. Capitalist society today is owned by private people and pheasant are replaced by wage earners, people who have no land but who give their labour, the monarchy has less power. There is more freedom today, anyone could become bourgeois; this is usually aristocrats who chose to break away from that duty and start a factory.

Socialism is the ownership of means of production. The ultimate goal however is communism, to irridicate class struggle.