I would say Karl Marx could be a economist/politician philosopher. Like Plato wrote more or less about is one back in the day in his “Republic”
Apart from communism I guess he was important because He pretended establish a new social system starting from the beginning: social class, equality, justice, and a critical to the capitalism of his era.
Nevertheless is quite complex how to classify Marx and Engels because he studied a State using diferent philosophy principles.

. Karl Marx is a dreamer ... A fancy dreamer ... Just a grown up child ...

. See ... my friends ... I want you to understand this ...

. One of the most fundamental psychological things has to be understood:

. Equality is an illusion.

. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, and other communist thinkers of the world have created almost a conviction in millions of people’s minds - not only those who are communist but also those who are not communist - that equality should be the goal.

. Only machines can be equal; man cannot be. If you want man to be equal, then you will have to destroy his humanity and make him a robot.

. It is very simple: just as two faces are not the same, in the whole world even two fingerprints are not the same - and you want two beings to be the same? You don’t value the being more than the fingerprint even? A very absurd idea of equality has become widespread.

. Why it became so influential can be understood very easily. Everybody feels inferior to somebody, either intellectually, financially, or physically.

. In some way everybody carries deep down an inferiority complex, because he is continuously comparing himself with others. Naturally, somebody has more intelligence, somebody has more physical strength, somebody can run faster than you, somebody can swim better. It is impossible for anybody not to feel inferior if he starts comparing.

. Politics has existed always, politicians have existed always, but what has happened? The world remains the same sorry-go-round! In fact, misery goes on becoming multiplied every day. All these revolutionaries and radical politicians have only proved to be mischievous – with good intentions, of course; but intentions don’t count at all – what counts is consciousness.

. The politician has no consciousness; in fact, he is trying to avoid his own inner problems, he is trying to escape from his own problems. And the easiest way to escape from oneself is to become concerned about world problems, economics, politics, history, service to the poor, transformation of the conditions of the society, reformation. All these are strategies for escaping from one’s own problems – subtle strategies, dangerous, because one feels that one is doing something great, while one is simply being a coward……

. Politicians have been driving the whole world for centuries – to where, to what end? Is it not time enough that we should see the whole stupidity of the game? At least we are aware, fully aware, of five thousand years of politics; before that the case must have been the same, but after five thousand years of political games what has happened? Man remains in the same darkness, in the same misery, in the same hell. Yes, politics goes on giving him hope – a hope for a better tomorrow, which never comes. Tomorrows never come.

. It is the opium of the people. Karl Marx says religion is the opium of the people. It is true, ninety-nine point nine percent it is true; just point one percent it is not true. A Buddha, a Jesus, a Lao Tzu, a Zarathustra, just these few people can be counted in that point one percent, otherwise Karl Marx is ninety-nine point nine percent right, that religion has proved the opium of the people. It has kept people in a drugged state, almost in such a sleep that they can tolerate an intolerable existence, that they can tolerate all kinds of slavery, starvation, in the hope of a better tomorrow. Religions used to give this better tomorrow in the other world, after death.

. People come to me and ask, “What will happen after death?” I don’t answer them, I ask them another question instead. I ask them, “Forget all about after death, let me ask you one thing: what is happening before death?” Because whatsoever is happening before death will continue to happen after death. It is a continuum: your consciousness will be the same – before or after will not make any difference. The body may not be the same, the container may change, but the content will remain the same. Whatsoever happens is happening to the content, not to the container.

. Think about the goose, don’t be bothered about the bottle. You may have a different bottle, better-produced, of better material, more sophisticated, a crystal bottle, a diamond bottle, but that does not make any difference. What makes the difference is your consciousness – the goose.

. First, religion was giving opium to the people “tomorrow,” “after death.” Millions of people remained in that state of druggedness, under that chloroform – religious chloroform.

. Now politics is doing the same. Even communism has proved nothing but a new opium for the masses ...

. Yes ... that's true ...

. In fact ...

. Communism is a new kind of religion.

. The strategy is the same: “Tomorrow will come the revolution, and everything will be all right.” You have to sacrifice your today for tomorrow, and the tomorrow never comes.

. And then ... we have the new stupid priests as a Marx, Lenin etc ...

Just what kind of philosopher was Karl Marx? — Shawn

Marx not only established "Communism" as a visible political ideology on the world stage, but he also developed the theory of historical materialism as an attempt to refute the economic capitalist system.

Many forget that Marx's main objective was, like so many others in his day, to prove to philosophy as a whole that it is not metaphysics that builds the world - as Hegel affirmed -, because the world is material, and what structures the perception of people's world, are their material economic structures.

As they say: - Marx turned Hegel upside down.

It is ironic that his own work, which was completely against metaphysics, would eventually be used as the basis for a utopian political metaphysical idea - Communism -. For that, you thank Lenin.

However, how does one classify Marx in terms of being just a philosopher apart from 'communism' if at all possible. What are your thoughts? — Shawn

Had a quick brainstorm on it. I would suspect he was monist, and plantonist, in terms of his philosophical perspective. I'm just speculating.

Just what kind of philosopher was Karl Marx? — Shawn

Marx was a brilliant economist, no doubt about that. Otherwise, he could have been any of us here pontificating about all kinds of non-sense.

But...you've got to give the guy credit because all those years years he spent at the library in London weren't for naught. He came up with (essentially) his own socio-economic system that half the world bought into, lock, stock, and barrel, a system that has caused massive chaos, death, and destruction for over a century and a half now.

No meager accomplishment.

Marx (in the end) was a historical determinist (i.e. hegelian materialist), socioeconomist & anti-bakuninist ... but, IMO, not much of a philosopher after 1857 (The Grundrisse).

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, and other communist thinkers of the world have created almost a conviction in millions of people’s minds - not only those who are communist but also those who are not communist - that equality should be the goal. — Anand-Haqq

You left out Jesus.

That's accurate. Hegel spoke nonsense. Nonsense turned upside down is still nonsense.

That's accurate. Hegel spoke nonsense. Nonsense turned upside down is still nonsense. — Banno

I disagree about Hegel, but on Marx I fully agree.

:up:

Agreed that Marx is better understood as a socioeconomist rather than a philosopher, albeit he was more interested in the latter as a student and young adult, which helped lay conceptual foundations for his subsequent work and analysis in the former.

Marx (in the end) was a historical determinist — 180 Proof

Mostly untrue, increasingly so after the Revolutions of 1848 and after subsequent crises of Capitalism failed to bring about socialist revolution.

Clarify, if you don't mind.

Happily, tomorrow or this weekend (i.e. not while having had a few drinks :party:)

However, how does one classify Marx in terms of being just a philosopher apart from 'communism' if at all possible. What are your thoughts? — Shawn

I'd say check out his early works. Or one of my favorites, because it's so side, The German Ideology.

What do you make of this quote? It summarizes much of what comes to mind when I think of Marx (as a non-expert who likes the guy as a philosopher and not as my political guru.)

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness. — Marx

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2

It's an unspoken truth that Karl Marx is one of the most influential philosopher in my view of modernity. — Shawn

I think you could also say that Marx is one of the most widely coopted and least read thinkers of modernity.

Anecdotal I know but I have yet to meet a Marxist that has actually read Marx and I have met many. On asking around at University, this seemed to be a common thing. There ought to be an award going for the most referenced unread books - Das Kapital would be in there along with The Bible and A Brief History of Time.

How many kinds of philosopher are there, I find myself wondering?

Some answers suggest there are but 2; good and therefore right, and wrong and therefore bad.

Others seem to suggest that to be a kind of philosopher is to be a follower of another philosopher, which suggests that Plato must have been a Platonist or he was no philosopher at all.

I would suggest that Marx should be classified with Nietzsche as an extravagantly hairy philosopher.

I think the perception that Marx is a determinist is largely due to the dominance of The Communist Manifesto in the public discourse that surrounds Marx, and the heuristic approach of treating the document as the overarching expression of Marxism, despite how early it appears in Marx's working intellectual life (he wrote it when he was only 30, and to be fair additional work around that time was also fairly deterministic and assured, but his intellectual output continued for another 30 years). It can also be due to the fact that his productive output is largely contained within the 1840s when he was in his twenties and entering into his thirties, although his more profound and mature work was largely written sporadically from 1852 (The Eighteenth Brumaire) until his death in 1883.

After the Revolutions of 1848 fail to produce the desired socialist revolution, he begins to shy away from the confident determinism of his youth, which is reflected in the language and choice of words he uses, particularly in Grundrisse and Capital, where he rarely utilizes causal language preferring instead to use words such as "tendency", "appears", "reveals", etc. when dissecting Capitalism. For example, it's sometimes pointed out that Marx's Fall of the Rate of Profit is a deterministic law that ensures the (eventually) self-destruction of Capitalism, but he nevertheless refers to it as a "tendency" after introducing the concept in both Grundrisse and Capital V3 and then goes on provides counteracting factors. From a more Archimedean point of view, I think Marx's framework of dialectical historical materialism precludes determinism given the complex relationship between modes of production and social reproduction, technology, class and social relations, and the clash of ideology that is both engendered by and shapes those material relations.

Returning to Marx's post-1848 experiences, we continue to see repeated disappointment influence what was otherwise more deterministic outlooks after subsequent economic crises, increasingly global in scale, fail to produce the desired revolutionary changes (e.g. Panic of 1857, 1866, and 1873).

Cool. Marx the political philosopher was a determinist but Marx the socioeconomist, etc certainly was more authoritarian (i.e. vanguardist, statist) than libertarian (i.e. anti-statist).

Others seem to suggest that to be a kind of philosopher is to be a follower of another philosopher, which suggests that Plato must have been a Platonist or he was no philosopher at all.

I would suggest that Marx should be classified with Nietzsche as an extravagantly hairy philosopher. — unenlightened

:lol: :up:

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. — Marx

I have been interested in that statement since I first read it. It is an observation brought forward to argue about other arguments. The passage could be cited as an example of where Marx did not hold his own views up to this lens. I don't want to kick his ass or save it so that part bores me.

Being a witness to a process is interesting. Marx's desire to have a quality accepted as fundamentally obvious killed it at the same time.

True, but, there's a category of importance or impotence nowadays on every roster.

It would be interesting if someone took everything Marx wrote about actual philosophy (as opposed to history or social theory) and put it into book form. It probably wouldn't be a long book, so he is not much of an actual philosopher as compared to, say, Kant

In my view, Marx is best best viewed as a "philosopher-scientist" with strong parallels to the founders of other sciences in the same period, for instance Newton, Darwin and Freud.

Of course, these science founders did not do there work in a vacuum. There's a lot of pieces and concepts floating around, such as various observations and physics formula in the case of Newton, existing theories of evolution in the case of Darwin, and many theories of mind in the case of Freud. What makes these the "founder reference" of their respective fields is they are the first to provide a systemic theory.

Likewise, Marx is aware science requires predictions but lacks, as with all the philosopher-scientists, a clear distinction between metaphysics, retrospective explanation, unfalsefiable-prediction, and falsefiable prediction. We can of course debate if Marx is closer to Newton trying to focus on prediction and ignore the metaphysical questions this brings up (if we ignore the alchemy), or then closer to Darwin whom we can criticize as still mostly doing retrospective explanation lacking a mechanism of evolution (as cell function and reproduction is entirely unknown to him, and so there's no predictive evidence the principle of natural selection is correct compared to competing theories of evolution such as Lamarck, it just rather turns out to be the right one), or then Freud who is mostly doing retrospective explanation as well as unverifiable predictions.

This brings up the question of what science Marx founded. Marx essentially founded social science in a general sense that encompasses what we consider today the separate fields economics, social sciences, and political science.

What makes Marx a founder is in moving from "explanatory theories", found in all precursors to science, to predictive theory of which we understand science to require, or indeed "to be" today.

To give an example of this difference, Smith explains the separate rolls of nail making in a nail making workshop; e.i. specialization. However, Smith provides no theory upon which to predict where we will find specialization in the world, the degree of specialization nor the the social consequence. Specialization is an important concept and explanation for many things we see, but in itself it is not a predictive theory. As the principle appears in Smith, our application of it would simply be "specialization is efficient ... until it isn't". For instance, when my shoes get tied to go outside, I do not observe a specialist tying my shoes; if specialization was more efficient then I should be able to predict that shoe-tying specialists would make our economy more efficient and would be a thing by now, and if not now then certainly will emerge at some point. Obviously, this is not a good prediction and some things are good to specialize and others not, the principle of specialization is efficient in itself is not predictive; it is only sensible as a tautology of being efficient unless it isn't efficient. A predictive theory requires more development.

Marx is the first to bring these principles into some semblance of a predictive theory, relating specialization to technological and social structures that bring it about and predictions of what consequence it has in different configurations. There is of course the physical technological prerequisites that make specialization possible, and of course Smith and other economists of the time are aware of. However, Marx goes much further into this phenomenon, drawing attention to critical aspects of human psychology, that humans are not tools and machines completely compliant in being specialized; that a hammer has no problem being a hammer, whereas a "hammerist" who only hammers all day may develop an aversion to this activity. The phenomena is much more complex than the engineering point of view. So we may draw analogy to Newton's analysis of gravity that brings together many different aspects of the same phenomenon into the first systemic analysis, that Marx is the first to provide a "sufficient enough" systemic analysis of the phenomenon of specialization; that not only are there physical prerequisites, but also prerequisites in social structure and furthermore specialization has complex interactions with human psychology and thus sociological and political phenomena. There is clearly an important element of motivation that needs consideration, the hammerist is motivated by what or for what to hammer, will he or she keep hammering or are there other motivations that result in different observable behaviour: i.e. labour agitation, strike and revolution? Marx also develops the theory further to distinguish different kinds of specialization, that specialization for commodity production organized by stock corporations under capitalism is very different than the specialization of craftsmen organized in guilds under feudalism; resulting in very different "knock-on" social relations.

Of course, we can doubt Marx's predictions (in what exactly the predictions are and whether they happen) or point out they are incomplete in addressing social phenomenon (they predict some observations but not others, just as Newtonian physics predict some physical observations but not others and Newton himself takes the theory to far and makes many bad predictions, for instance in understanding light), and, as with the other "philosopher-scientists" we can point to lot's of concepts that are not, under more careful consideration, predictive science (for instance, Newton's work on Alchemy; which in his defense, likely could not have been systematized into chemistry at the time). We can also go further and make parallels with Freud who is basically not doing science, yet nevertheless provides a systemic enough theory to be a founder of psychology (in analogy with Newton and Darwin), which we can hope is now doing actual science today (I have my doubts). The point here is simply that Marx does provide a systemic analysis of the phenomena and does provide predictions from a "coherent enough" theoretical description.

Of note, Marx predicts Marx won't be mainstream under capitalism, as the elites of a society always promote theories that justify their elitism and power. Therefore, the development of "economics" as we know it today as essentially an apology for capitalism with very little predictive power and essentially denying the moral lives of human capital inputs to productive processes, that those processes are efficient regardless of the human or environmental cost insofar as they are productive according to the standards of efficiency set by the managers of and investors in those processes (i.e. a corporation increasing in value on the stock market is doing something efficient, winning a competition, and therefore the implication is that it is justified, regardless of its impact on society and the environment and whether that impact is a justifiable goal any individual and society as whole does or should have); in other words, the development of economists as an intellectually isolated field from sociology, politics and moral philosophy, that somehow manages to justify capitalism without considering related sociological, political and moral philosophical questions that capitalism, or any organizational system, clearly relates to and cannot possibly be evaluated without; or then, to put it more bluntly, that the modern economists is essentially detached from reality, possessing almost no analytical skills that we can identify as having any worth, and is essentially a source of endless conceptual garbage just as monks and priests prattling on about the divine rights of kings and popes under feudalism and near endless subtle analysis of society based on such a principle of which we have essentially no use of today.

Therefore, if you reject Marx off-hand as not worth your time to study, you maybe correct even without bothering to study the question nor possibly having any adequate analysis, or you maybe a data point in Marx's prediction above and so just another tool. Although this is an aside to the question of how we might classify Marx. Marx also has political agenda, a political bias in his work, but insofar as he takes his moral perspective for granted and conceives of himself as doing objective science ("predicting" communism will come about, rather than admitting his intention is to help bring communism about through his writing about predicting it; a goal we may or may not agree with), then it is best to consider his non-predictive philosophical concepts as part of his scientific effort.