Karl Marx

By Emeka Obi

No economist has ever mattered more, and none has been more consequential in the wrong hands. Karl Marx was born in Trier, Prussia, in 1818, the son of a lawyer, and trained as a philosopher — a doctorate on Democritus and Epicurus at twenty-three — before journalism, exile, and poverty turned him into the anatomist of capitalism. Expelled from Germany, France, and Belgium, he settled in London in 1849, where he spent decades in the British Museum reading room while his family lived on the edge of destitution in Soho, kept alive by the money and loyalty of Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto (1848), written with Engels, was the pamphlet: history as the history of class struggles, the bourgeoisie as history's gravediggers, the famous closing summons. Capital (1867) was the science — or the attempt at one. Marx took the labor theory of value from Ricardo and drove it to its limit: the worker sells not labor but labor-power, and the capitalist pockets the difference between what that power produces and what it costs to reproduce — surplus value, the secret of profit and, in Marx's account, of exploitation. Around this mechanism he built a whole architecture: the falling rate of profit, the reserve army of labor, the concentration of capital, the immiseration of the proletariat, and the claim that capitalism manufactures both its own gravediggers and the material abundance that socialism would inherit. The volumes that followed were assembled by Engels from notebooks after Marx's death in 1883. What Marx could not do was finish: the system promises a rigorous derivation of crisis from value theory, and generations of scholars have argued ever since over whether the derivation works. But the power of the project never depended on the footnotes. Marx gave the industrial age its master narrative — a story in which economics is not a technique but the hidden script of history, in which class interest explains politics, law, religion, and art, and in which the present order carries its own negation inside it. That story escaped the library. It became the official doctrine of states ruling a third of humanity, the catechism of revolutions from Petrograd to Havana to Beijing, the vocabulary — bourgeoisie, proletariat, alienation, ideology, base and superstructure — in which the twentieth century argued with itself. Even his enemies think in his categories: every modern discussion of inequality, power, and who benefits from the rules of the game is conducted in a language Marx helped forge.

Impact on civilization

Marx's impact is the largest of any economist in history, measured in states founded and lives rearranged. His ideas became the legitimating doctrine of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and dozens of revolutionary movements — the twentieth century's great ideological civil war was fought, on one side, in his name. The human cost of regimes ruling in that name is among the darkest chapters of modern history. Intellectually, the impact is equally vast and more durable: historical materialism founded whole disciplines and schools — critical theory, dependency theory, labor history, cultural studies — and concepts like alienation, commodity fetishism, and ideology passed permanently into the general vocabulary. Mainstream economics defined itself for a century largely in opposition to him; yet his questions — who captures the surplus, how does economic power translate into political power, is growth compatible with justice — are the questions economics still cannot escape. Love him or loathe him, the modern world is unintelligible without him.