Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Marx's "base determines superstructure" axiom, however, requires qualification: the base is the whole of productive relationships, not only a given economic element, e.g. the working class; historically, the superstructure varies and develops unevenly in society's different activities; for example, art, politics, economics, etc.
This is reflected both at the general level of lack of understanding of the social nature of technological change embodied in Marx's theory of the value-form, reflected in widespread ignorance of the detail of the "rational kernel" of Hegel's dialectic [7] whose the principal 'forms of being' Marx used to structure the whole of the work on ...
Kantian philosophy was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built—particularly as it was developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel's dialectical method, which was taken up by Karl Marx, was an extension of the method of reasoning by antinomies that Kant used. [1] [better source needed]
There Marx says he intends to use Hegelian dialectics but in revised form. He defends Hegel against those who view him as a "dead dog" and then says, "I openly avowed myself as the pupil of that mighty thinker Hegel". [20] Marx credits Hegel with "being the first to present [dialectic's] form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner".
Marx's early writings are thus a response to Hegel, German idealism, and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head", in his own view of his role by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas instead of the other way around.
G.A. Cohen argues in Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence that a society's superstructure stabilizes or entrenches its economic structure, but that the economic base is primary and the superstructure secondary. That said, it is precisely because the superstructure strongly affects the base that the base selects that superstructure.
Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx and Henriette Pressburg. He was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, an ancient city then part of the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine. [15] Marx's family was originally non-religious Jewish but had converted formally to Christianity before his birth.
Karl Marx's doctrine of "historical inevitabilities" and historical materialism is one of the more influential reactions to this part of Hegel's thought. Significantly, Karl Marx's theory of alienation argues that capitalism disrupts traditional relationships between workers and their work.