Karl Marx and Adam Smith

Karl Marx and Adam Smith are in important ways two of the most influential people in the lives of each of living at the end of the 20th century, although - ironically - we tend not to see the extent of their influence simply because it is so vast. It is like the air around us, something essential to our environment but impossible to see. But while oxygen supports us as biological entities, the ideas of Marx and Smith in their different ways support us as social animals.

This paper explores the contributions of these two thinkers about the human condition, looking briefly at the personal backgrounds of these two political philosophers before examining their ideas about social justice, the economy and the ways in which governments should and should not intervene in the economies of their states.

The German Marx, born in 1818 and living through 1883, was above all other things (along with Friedrich Engels) the founder of scientific socialism, that system of political equalization and redress of past historical abuses of the working class. As the creator of what would become modern communism (although it should be noted that socialism as Marx and Engels envisioned it has never realized in its entirety by any communist state). Marx was one of the most influential thinkers of all times, a point that is still undeniably true despite the collapse of the Communist states that sprang up in the wake of World War II. (Indeed, it is arguably that had the Eastern Bloc countries

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ion; he was acquitted but was expelled from Germany, and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed. Later in the same year he was again banished from France; he spent the remainder of his life in London. In England Marx devoted himself to study and writing and to efforts to build an international communist movement. During this period he wrote a number of works that are regarded as classics of communist theory. These include his greatest work, Das Kapital, which was published in part posthumously and which was edited by Engels. The multi-volume work is a systematic and historical analysis of the economy of the capitalist system of society, in which Marx developed the theory that the capitalist class exploits the working class by appropriating the surplus value produced by the working class (Ollman, 1977, p. 69). Marx's next work, The Civil War in France (1871), analyzed the experience of the short-lived revolutionary government established in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (see Commune of Paris, 1871). In this work Marx interpreted the formation and existence of the Commune as a historical confirmation of his theory that it is necessary for workers to seize political power by armed insurrection and then to destroy the capit

Category: Economics - K