Marx & Engels: Foundations

The most consequential friendship in modern thought

A course on the thought of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels.

What you will learn

  • Grasp that Marx and Engels brought complementary halves: the dialectical method and critique (Marx) and the empirical knowledge of the industrial working class (Engels).
  • See that Engels reached communism independently, 'by another road,' rather than as Marx's pupil.
  • Feel the course's hidden question take shape: was the partnership a meeting of equals?
  • Grasp the materialist conception of history: 'life determines consciousness,' not the reverse.
  • Understand base and superstructure — that a society's ruling ideas tend to be the ideas of its ruling class.
  • See that this method was the partnership's first jointly-forged 'outlook,' neither man's alone.
  • Understand estranged labour — that under wage-labour the worker's own product confronts him as an alien power.
  • Grasp the idea of species-being: that humans are the creatures who realise themselves in free, creative work.

Course outline

  1. Two Halves Meet — Paris, 1844. A philosopher with no factory and a factory-man with no philosophy — who first met and disliked each other — strike the alliance of a lifetime.
  2. Turning Hegel Over — Brussels, 1845–46. Marx and Engels take the grandest philosophy of the age and stand it on its head: not ideas making history, but the material life of human beings making their ideas.
  3. Alienation — Paris, 1844. In manuscripts he never published, the young Marx names the wound at the heart of modern labour: the worker builds the world and is made poorer, and less himself, by the building.
  4. A Spectre Haunting Europe — 1848. With Europe about to ignite, Marx and Engels are handed the task of writing a creed for a revolution — and turn out the most famous pamphlet ever printed.
  5. The Secret Hidden in Plain Sight — London, the British Museum. Marx asks where profit really comes from if every exchange is fair — and finds the answer in the one commodity that makes more than it costs.
  6. The Commune, and After — Marx and Engels did say what comes after capitalism: the workers must first take political power, and the Paris Commune of 1871 showed the form that power could take. Communist society then passes…

Works read in this course

  • Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction — Marx's 1844 essay where philosophy meets the proletariat — and the line 'religion is the opium of the people' appears.
  • The Condition of the Working Class in England — Engels' 1845 eye-witness study of industrial Manchester, written before he and Marx joined forces — the empirical ground of everything after.
  • The German Ideology — The 1845–46 manuscript where Marx and Engels first work out the materialist conception of history.
  • The Communist Manifesto — The 1848 creed written for the Communist League — class struggle as the motor of history.

Part of the Simposeum course library.