Marx on Class. essays

Marx on Class. essays The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-alienation. But the former class finds in this self alienation its confirmation and its good, its own power...the class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self alienation, it sees in its own powerlessness... This extract is taken from Karl Marx, The Holy Family (1845). It was written at a time of upheaval in Karl Marxs life. Just after he was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung at Cologne in 1842. He worked there until his extreme radical views led to the suppression of the paper, and Marx went to Paris, where he met Engels and collaborated with him in works of political philosophy. Engels was a (German philosopher) the son of a factory owner who, went on to supervised his father's business in Manchester and wrote influential essays on the social and political conditions in Britain in the 1840s, including The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), that influenced Marxs work on class at the time. Other influences at the time would have been Feuerbach on whom he wrote a thesis on in 1845. Feuerbach had a materialistic out look on history. He held to the philosophical theory that only physical matter is real and that all phenomena and processes can be explained by reference to it. Related to this is the doctrine that political and social change is triggered by change in the material and economic basis of society. Also Hegel, Marx also based his theory of dialectical materialism on Hegel's work such as The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), which describes the progression of the human mind from consciousness through self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and rel igion to absolute knowledge although he later then rejected aspects of the philosophy claiming it was to abstract. In the gobbet statement Marx is saying that the property owner class (the aristocracy, the upper class) and the class of the masses (the working cl...