Karl Marx
...reely developed their nature in cooperative production. (Raddatz 123) It was also in France that Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels. Marx was expelled from France at the end of 1844. He and Engels moved to Brussels where he remained for the next three years. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the materialist conception of history. This is when he developed a manuscript, of which the basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production."(Rockmore 54) Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present industrial capitalism and its replacement by communism. At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he also wrote a polemic “The Poverty of Philosophy” against the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon . He also joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigré workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians. (Rockmore 68) At a conference of the League in London at the end of 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a succinct declaration of their position. Scarcely was The Communist Manifesto published when the 1848 revolutions broke out in Europe. In early 1848 Marx moved back to Paris when a revolution first broke out and onto Germany where he founded, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.(Raddatz 126) The paper supported a radical democratic line against the Prussian autocracy and Marx devoted his main energies to its editorship since the Communist League had been virtually disbanded. Marx's paper was suppressed and he sought refuge in London in May 1849 to begin the "long, sleepless night of exile" that was to last for the rest of his life. (Rockmore 75) Marx's major work on political economy made slow progress. In 1857 he had produced a 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, foreign trade and the world market. The Grundrisse as it was called was not published until 1941. In the early 1860s he broke off his work to compose three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy. It was not until 1867 that Marx was able to publish the first results of his work in volume 1 of Capital, a work that analyzed the capitalist process of production. (Wolff 90) In Capital, Marx argued that the economic part of any society is the most fundamental aspect of that society. The social, cultural and political sectors of a society are driven by the economic relations within society. All societies must produce there means of subsistence. In the production process there are two quite separate groups of actors: those who own the means of production and those who don't. The relations between those two groups are the most fundamental in any society. These relations of production refer to the relationships that human beings enter into in order to satisfy the economic needs of a society. In modern society capital is a most important ingredient in the process. Marx used the word Capitalism for that kind of economic production system. Capital is money but it is much more than money. Modern production processes involve investment in goods, services and people. Money is used in quite another way than in the pre-capitalistic society. In that society a farmer household, after having produced for its own needs, would sell any of a surplus in order to buy those commodities it could not produce itself. But in capitalism, the money is invested in order to make more money, to yield a profit. The capitalist will invest in commodities such as buildings, tools and workers. The capitalist's workers are commodities as well. According to Marx the capitalist will invest in those to make a profit. All these commodities are the capitalist's means of production. According to Marx the workers are alienated because they are simply an investment on the part of the capitalist. (Wolff) These groups of wage earners are exploited. The wage earner produces a surplus value that will be added to the capitalist's profits. Profit and not need determines the commodities that are produced as well as the manner in which people will be employed. So in capitalist society there will be two groups of people with differing interests. The wage earners, the worker will want to increase their wages; the group of capitalists will want to increase profits. Those two groups are involved in a class-conflict or class struggle, although they are mutually dependent upon each other. According to Marx, the function of the state in a capitalist society is to maintain the capitalist economy in existence by continually reinforcing th...