The real importance of this process is as part of the worker’s “self-creation”, where the personality of the producer is invested in their product – this existentialist idea also anticipates the work of William Morris, the pioneer English socialist and leader of the Arts and Crafts movement. Instead, the industrial product has become a mere anonymous commodity, prized for its “exchange-value” rather than any “use-value” in itself, and the worker, at the same time, becomes commodifed under this system, valued as a labour resource rather than a unique human being.

         Not surprisingly, perhaps, Marx’s political views brought him into early conflict with academia and even his work as a journalist was soon suppressed by the Prussian state. In 1843 he moved to Paris in search of more progressive surroundings, where he met a fellow German, Friedrich Engels, who became his lifelong collaborator. Engels, who had been working hi his family’s textile business in Manchester, gave Marx some first-hand experience of capitalism, as well as much-needed financial support. In Paris his radical journalism met with further opposition from the government and he was forced to move to Brussels until the onset of the German revolution of 1848. By this time he had written the famous Communist Manifesto for the Communist League he had helped establish there. The revolution in Germany collapsed in 1849 and he then moved back from Cologne to Paris before finally settling down to live in London. It was only after his death in 1883 that his more famous philosophical writings began to appear in print, with the exception of the first volume of his study of Capital which he did see published in 1867.

         Through Marx accepted that capitalism had produced many benefits for society, such as much greater prosperity through an increase in productivity, he saw no reason for the unfair “relations of production”, where a minority seemed at liberty to exploit the labour of the majority. As a final stage in the development of an “ideal” society, one without class divisions or destructive “antagonisms”, he predicted a social revolution that would resolve these contradictions and create a new system of common ownership of the means of production:

the possibilities for revolution based on his analysis of historical progress. He saw that in the civilisations of the past a particular society would tend to collapse when the “contradictions” within the system had broken out onto the surface. As he wrote at the beginning of his famous work, The Communist Manifesto:

         The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.6

         Besides the continuing exploitation of one class by another, in modern society a new danger had arisen inside the system. As a consequence of the division of labour within the capitalist mode of production, the new industrialised worker had now become “alienated” from his work. By breaking up industrial process into a series of specialized components, capitalism had robbed ordinary workers of any meaningful connection with their work. As Marx somewhat lyrically described it, referring to a previous system of production:

         Supposing that we had produced in a human manner; each of us would in his production have doubly affirmed himself and his fellow men. I would have objectified in my production my individuality and its peculiarity and thus both in my activity enjoyed and individual expression of my life and also in looking at the object have had the individual pleasure of realizing that my personality was objective, visible to the sense and thus a power raised beyond all doubt.7

the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.4 

This is the now classic description of the “base and superstructure” model, depicting the geological conception of history that Claude Lévi-Strauss was so enamoured with. The base consists of two components, firstly the “forces of production”, being the raw materials, machinery and labour required for producing industrial goods. The second part he called the “relations of production”, referring to the ways in which the work is organized, such as in the typical pyramidal structure of the capitalist corporate hierarchy.

         The superstructure which rises out of this base and which is, in Marx’s terms, determined by it, consists of the social, political and legal institutions that make up the society’s “consciousness”. Quite how deterministic Marx meant this model to be is still the subject of much argument among scholars. Marx does, however, suggest a direct link between the two components of the base, when he says “the hand-mill will give you a society with the feudal lord, the steam-engine a society with the industrial capitalist”.5 This presents a slightly caricatured version of Marx’s thinking on the process of history which, in the case of the base and superstructure relationship, was more complex than first appears. In fact the reasoning behind Marx’s call for philosophers to change the world lies with the problem caused by one section of society being exploited by another. In Marx’s model the class that controls the base thereby also controls the superstructure, and under capitalism this meant the working classes being locked into their relations of production. With the institutions of the superstructure being controlled by bourgeoisies, this meant that the workers were prevented from gaining any understanding of their exploitation. Various corollaries to this scenario soon followed in Marx’s thinking, as he set out

         It was consciousness that became the great pivot-point for Marx, about which he tried to turn Hegel’s philosophy on its head, although more accurately he described it as standing Hegel on his feet. He felt that the idealist approach had tried to build a philosophy from ideas, while he was attempting to reverse this and build an alternative from experience. Hegel had, according to Marx, simply inverted the real course of history, so to correct this Marx constructed a system more closely modeled on reality. He did borrow, however, Hegel’s dialectical model, where progress is described as an interplay between consciousness and reality. Where in Hegel this process leas to a refinement of concepts, with Marx it transforms the material conditions of reality. In Marx’s terms this amounted to a “dialectical materialism”, although he himself only ever referred to it as the “materialist conception of history”. As he wrote in 1859, in one of his few philosophical works to be published during his lifetime:

         The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life-process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.3

         Marx seemed to suggest that as individuals we are restricted in our actions due to the presence of an unseen structure that appears to limit the mind’s potential for free thinking. In a model comparable to the structuralist conception of the underlying systems of language, Marx set out the means by which this deterministic process might take place:

         In the social production of their life men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes 

change it.”1 To begin to understand the work of Marx and the reason for his significant and lasting influence, it is necessary to consider a few of his key concepts before discussing their broader impact.

         In approaching Marx’s philosophy it is important to understand his situation in history, as a student in Berlin in the aftermath of Hegel’s dominating influence. Marx arrived in Berlin in 1836, just five years after the great philosopher had died. Hegel had been teaching in Berlin as a professor of philosophy since 1818 and had left a huge and lasting legacy which the next generation now had to deal with. For Marx and a group of colleagues who called themselves the Young Hegelians, the emphasis was on trying to locate the weak points in the great edifice of Hegel’s system. We have seen in Chapter 1 how Hegel had constructed a historical philosophy which presented the whole course of history as the quest for absolute knowledge. Hegel had shown the force behind this process to be emerging “world-spirit”, an “idea” attempting to express itself in the physical forms of the visible world. The culmination of Hegel’s history took place in the mind of the philosopher, being the ultimate manifestation of “spirit” as it comes to its own self-understanding. This idealism has gone down in history as one of Hegel’s grandest conceptions and it is this great historical principle that soon attracted Marx’s attention.

         Rather than thinker with the minutiae in attempting to refine Hegel’s system, Marx set out to attack its foundations by questioning its most basic assumptions. He dismissed philosophical history as a dry academic abstraction, cut off from the real history of everyday conditions and experience:

         The Hegelian philosophy of history is the last consequence, reduced to its ‘finest expression’, of all this German historiography, for which it is not a question of real, nor even of political, interests, but of pure thoughts, which consequently must appear to Saint Bruno, as a series of ‘thoughts’ that devour one another and are finally swallowed up in ‘self-consciousness’.2