KARL MARX AND THE BIRTH OF SOCIALISM
Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany on 5 May 1918. The man with whom Marx would become linked in the pursuit of social reform, Friedrich Engels, was born about two years later--29 November 1920--in Barmen (now a part of the city of Wuppertal), Germany. Later in their lives, Marx and Engels would be closely identified with the concept of socialism, generally understood as a social system based on the ownership in common of the means of production and distribution. The use of the term socialism to describe this concept began in the 1830s, some 12-to-15 years after the birth of Marx and Engels, and well before they began to form their own ideas of social philosophy. Although Marx did some of his work in Germany, most was done in England, where he settled permanently in 1849. Marx died in 1883.
In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the plight of the laboring classes became increasingly dismal, as the excesses of early capitalism proliferated. The inequities between the laboring and capitalist classes in society spawned the concept of socialism, and served as both a motivation and an inspiration for both Marx and Engels in the formulation of their own social philosophies.
Marx conceived of economics as an evolutionary science. Karl Marx also viewed economics as merely a part of broader societal processes. Marx raised economic theory above a preoccupation with agriculture and stationary states that had dominated earlier economic thought. Marx postulated that class structures in societies, the political systems in societies, and societal cultures were the product of the ways in which societies produced their goods and services. The labor theory of value occupied a prominent place in the broader economic theory developed by Marx. Marx postulated that the value of labor used established the exchange value for a commodity. Marx did not believe that the utility value of ...