Karl Marx Biography

Karl Marx biography

* Born in Prussia on May 5, 1818

* At university he was a Young Hegelians.

* He became a journalist, and his socialist writings would get him expelled from Germany and France.

* 1848, he published The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels and was exiled to London,

* In London he wrote the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867

* Buried in Highgate cemetery

Marx. Key ideas

1 Ontological assumption.

Work and labour define society and the individuals. Technology plus the social organisation of labour determines how we provide the means of production and the means of distributing wealth, and has implications beyond economic relations for society as awhile and in particular for consumption, the distribution of life chances and social inequalities. This is the root of the supremacy of Class and class relationships.

2 Social determinism

Social aspect of organisation of production generates inequality.

Foundation metaphor or economic determinism.

Determinism. Class not the only variable, bureaucracy, Change and nonmaterial forces religion and traditional culture such as confucianism

3 Social Change

* Change and social progress class dialectic drives history

* Unidimensional overstated the economic, simplistic theory of historical evolutuion, very dismissive of ancient cultures seen as antiquated

* Human agency and history. 'Men make history but not in the circumstances of their own choosing'

* Culture, nationalism religions. Medieval non progressive but still shaping our future eg ancestry

* Utopianism, agency men make history but not in the circumstances of their choosing. Reform must be based on material realities of that society.

* No blueprint assumed 'it would be all right on the night'.

4 Understanding Law from a marxist legal analytical perspective

* Law as a weapon of class conflict: police arrest the strikers.

* Marxist criminologists - 'Crimes of the Powerful' Frank Parkin.

* Prison population reflect Labour surpluses.

* Inequalities embodied and reinforced via legal institutions eg apartheid in South Africa. Contracts are not negotiated between equal groups when one of the parties is desperate for food or housing. 'The frst thing we must do is Kill all the lawyers' Shakespeare. It is contracts that bind the peasant to the land with unequal and unfair relationships.

* Not just state coercion but the domination of ideas (false consciousness)

* Legitimation - control and manipulation by ideas. Hegemonic cultures Gramsci; Reform and Progress. Reading ideologies Colin Sumner.

* Rule of law. Social harmony defuse conflict resolve disputes, constraints on the powerful. E P Thompson 'Whigs and Hunters'.

* Law as embodiment of commodity fetishism and human alienation, Pashukhanis

* Willem Bonger; Crime will disappear in a classless society?

* D Hay Albions Fatal Tree

* Rule of law and advantages of a relatively independent judiciary who have the ability and the trust of the parties and or public to act in a neutral and fair way when resolving disputes between parties.

THE RULE OF LAW AS 'AN UNQUALIFIED HUMAN GOOD'

Thompson's defence of the Rule of Law

The first 258 pages of Whigs and Hunters could have led Thompson to a

conventional Marxian conclusion that law is an instrument of brute force by

which the ruling class consolidates and reinforces its hegemony. To the

extent the hunters in Thompson's story thought themselves protected by the

ancestral/mythical 'rights of freeborn Englishmen', they were deluded: the

law branded them criminals and sentenced them to death for exercising their

supposed 'rights'. Indeed, Thompson concludes that the Black Act

constituted a form of state-sponsored 'Terror'.' 6 Thompson might have

ended his book on that note, but did not. 17 Instead, he added an afterword, 18

a seemingly incongruous essay not about the legal and political conflicts

over forest lands but about the implications of his study for the law and its

analysis by historians. It is entitled, 'The Rule of Law', and its eleven pages

comprise one of the greatest defences ever mounted of that concept (and one

of the very few penned by a self-described Marxist). 9

Having exposed the inequities of the Black Act and the enclosure

movement, Thompson proceeds to caution his readers not to infer from his

analysis that the Rule of Law is only a mask for the rule of a class. Law

surely is an instrument of class power, but that is not all it is. In writing this,

Thompson repudiates the typical 'Marxist-structural critique', according to

which the law has no independent existence, but is wholly determined by

social relations, which themselves are determined by the economic base of

social