Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in Trier in the Prussian Rhineland in 1818 and died in London in 1883. He studied law and philosophy in Bonn and Berlin, where he was drawn into the Young Hegelian circle, and became editor of the liberal Rheinische Zeitung until the Prussian authorities closed it in 1843. In Paris he began his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels. Expelled from France and then Belgium, he wrote with Engels The Communist Manifesto, published in February 1848 on the eve of the European revolutions.

After the defeat of 1848–49 Marx settled in London, where he lived for the rest of his life, often in poverty, supported by Engels and by journalism, including as a correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune. He worked in the British Museum on his critique of political economy, publishing Volume I of Capital in 1867; Engels edited the later volumes. He was a leading figure in the International Working Men's Association (founded 1864), where he clashed with Bakunin's anarchists, and wrote The Civil War in France (1871) on the Paris Commune.

• Historical materialism. History is driven by the development of productive forces; each economic structure rises and falls as it furthers or fetters that development, and the legal and political 'superstructure' is explained largely by the economic base. The canonical statement is the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
• Class and exploitation. Under capitalism workers sell their labour power for a wage; the value they produce beyond that wage is surplus value appropriated by capitalists. Exploitation is structural, not the result of individual greed.
• Alienation. Capitalist work separates people from the products and process of their labour, from one another and from their own creative potential.
• The state. The Manifesto calls the executive of the modern state 'a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie', but Marx's writings contain several models of the state, including one in which the bourgeoisie abdicates direct rule.
• The Commune as a model. In The Civil War in France Marx praised the Paris Commune's institutions — elected and recallable delegates, officials paid workers' wages, the fusion of legislative and executive work — as a form of 'democracy without professionals' and wrote that freedom consists in 'converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it'.
• Transition and communism. Marx rarely used the phrase 'dictatorship of the proletariat'; it denotes a transitional period of rule by the working-class majority. He refused to write 'recipes' for the future, but in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) described a higher phase of communism governed by the principle 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs'.

Marx's influence on twentieth-century politics was vast and divergent. Social-democratic parties drew on his analysis while pursuing reform through parliaments; Leninist parties invoked him to justify single-party states, central planning and the suppression of opposition. Scholars continue to debate how much of the latter can be traced to Marx's own thought.

For institution design, the most relevant strand is his reading of the Paris Commune: imperative mandates and recall, the subordination of officials to elected bodies, the replacement of standing armies with citizen militias, and the idea that administration can be simplified to the point where ordinary citizens can perform it. These themes reappear in councils and soviets, in Yugoslav workers' self-management, in proposals for participatory planning and in contemporary debates on economic democracy, worker co-operatives and the democratic control of investment. His analysis of how economic power shapes political power is also a standing challenge to designs that treat formal political equality as sufficient.

• Economic calculation and incentives. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek argued that without market prices for capital goods a planned economy cannot calculate efficiently or use dispersed knowledge — a critique many economists see as confirmed by Soviet-type economies' lack of innovation.
• Freedom. Liberal critics argue that abolishing private property in the means of production removes an essential counterweight to state power; twentieth-century communist states trampled civil and political liberties that many socialists themselves value.
• Predictions. Expected tendencies — immiseration of the working class, polarisation into two classes, revolution in the most advanced countries — did not occur as forecast, though defenders argue that Marx's analysis of crises and inequality remains illuminating.
• Thin institutional theory. Bakunin and later anarchists warned that a workers' state would produce a new ruling bureaucracy; democratic theorists note that Marx said little about how rights, dissent and minority protection would work after capitalism.

• The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Friedrich Engels) — Project Gutenberg
• A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), especially the Preface
• Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1867)
• The Civil War in France (1871)
• Critique of the Gotha Programme (written 1875)
• Overview: Jonathan Wolff and David Leopold, 'Karl Marx', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy