thereafter working as a writer and revolutionary activist, in close association
with FriedrichEngels, whose contribution to the Marxist canon is consider-
able. As befitted one of his theories, that there was a need for a close
connection between political practice and political theorizing, Marx was
always closely connected with communist and other revolutionary move-
ments, and much of his more evocative writing consisted either of journalistic
analyses of such movements, or historical accounts of would-be revolutions.
Modern scholarship has suggested that there are at least two distinct phases in
his writing: early Marx, which includes at least the rather humanistic ideas of
theEconomic and Philosophical Manuscripts(1844) andThe Communist Manifesto
(1848); and later Marx, which has the much more technical and ‘scientific’
economics ofDas Kapital, the first volume of which was published in 1867.
(However, it should be noted that some scholars of Marx deny that his work
was characterized by this epistemological break, and cite some works dis-
covered relatively recently, notably theGrundrisse, from between these peri-
ods, as evidence for continuity.)
The most crucial part of his rich and complex theories is the doctrine that
man, as a physical being, must be explained in materialistic terms. To Marx, a
man was a being whose identity and nature arose out of his purely practical
attempts to make his livelihood in what amounted almost to a struggle against a
hostile physical environment. As a result, what man did determined what he
became. In practical terms this meant that the conditions under which he
earned his living, as owner or proprietor, wage labourer or peasant, formed his
ideologyand consciousness. But as Marx also argued that man existed only as
a member of an economicclass, and that all classes were always in competition
with others below or above them in an economically-supported power
hierarchy, he saw human civilization as characterized by class warfare. That
this warfare had an economically-determined course, leading to an ultimate
communist society in which there would be no further class antagonisms, and
therefore no inequality, was an absolute article of faith. From it derived all the
later communist hopes forrevolutionfrom theproletariatand the socialist
belief in the need to abolish private ownership of property, because, for
Marxists, control of property is the very definition of a class system. Marx,
in his voluminous writings, touched on endless aspects of social life, but all
were ultimately linked to a simple formula: the essence of man is determined
by labour in pursuit of material ends; control of material both creates upper
and lower classes and gives the upper class control over politics, including the
construction of ideologies and social consciousness. Beyond this there are
implacable economic rules which ultimately determine economic develop-
ment. These economic laws make it inevitable that, ultimately,capitalismwill
collapse because of its own inherent contradictions, andcommunismwill
emerge. It is sometimes mistakenly argued today that the collapse of self-styled
Marx