Karl Marx: 4 Key Influences on His Revolutionary Thought
Karl Marx: Four Influences on His Thought
1. The Enlightenment
Marx was influenced by **Enlightenment ideology** and the concept of reason, especially practical reason. The first was oriented towards social programs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his defense of natural equality, greatly influenced him.
2. Hegelian Philosophy
Marx accepted and took care of the transformation of the ideal, and the religious notion of alienation from Feuerbach, as well as the ideal and religious thought. From Hegel, he took the notion of dialectics as the essence of nature, history, and as a method of knowledge: reason is dialectical, as is nature and history. The opposition of contraries is transformed in Marx’s thought into the concept of “class struggle”, the engine of historical progress, because without struggle, without revolution, no social change is possible.
3. Political Economy
Finally, Marx received influence from the first **English political economists**, Adam Smith and David Ricardo (1772-1823). Ricardo, a British economist of Jewish origin, is especially important for his theory of value and distribution. In his *Principles of Political Economy and Taxation*, he states that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor it contains. The value of a commodity increases when the quantity of labor necessary to manufacture it increases and decreases otherwise. In addition, the profits of capital are included in the prices of commodities. Marx’s travels deepened these notions based on alienated labor and surplus value. On the other hand, Marx criticized the political economy of concealing alienation in the capitalist system, presenting this mode of production as necessary and in accordance with human nature. Political economy accepts the conditions of the capitalist regime as eternal historical conditions, not as a product of historical processes, and considers relations between people as relations between things, thus hiding the state of exploitation of one class over others.
Marx’s Influence
The projection of Marx’s thought has been enormous, both in the emergence of socialist or communist systems originating from the Russian Revolution, and in the appearance of ideological and philosophical currents that have generated social and cultural movements still in force today, such as the Frankfurt School. The fundamental line of political and social application of Marxism was the Soviet one, that is, Leninism-Marxism, whose followers considered Lenin the most faithful and profound interpreter of Marx, for being the first to bring his ideas into reality. Marx had insisted on many occasions that Marxism was not a speculative theory, as stated in *Thesis XI on Feuerbach*: *”Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”* Marxism, not only Leninism, was applied in the Soviet Union, but also, with important transformations, in China through the thought of Mao Zedong, in Cuba through the revolution of Fidel Castro, and in Asian countries such as Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
Marxism Today
After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, communist parties remained as part of the democratic system, with the exception of Cuba and Asian countries, where an approach to Western democracies is perceived. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the influence of Marxism seemed to have declined. However, his critique of capitalism and his revolutionary desire remain relevant today.