Why is Karl Marx so special?

Karl Marx was basically just an intellectual bum, who hung out in libraries a lot. Nothing more. How on earth has he managed to become the best known economist on the planet, and the most influential? Why and how is Karl Marx so special? I think, first of all, we have to understand that Karl Marx wouldn't have had the slightest prospect of ever having achieved recognition, or probably even have survived, without the support and financial patronage of his young wealthy friend, Friedrich Engels. Engels financed Karl Marx and his family, and allowed Marx to hang out in the British Library for decades as a reasonably respectable intellectual for decades, and assisted in publication and promotion of his extensive writings. What do these writings consist of, exactly? Well, they are extremely detailed, perhaps rather too detailed, in their exhaustive examination of all aspects of money, trade, work, financial exchange and services. They attempt to generalize these detailed analyses to human existence in general and all of human history, in an effort to find the true nature of existence, and how human life can be perfected. Are they successful in this endeavor? Obviously not, how could they be, that's precisely why Karl Marx said ironically "I am not a Marxist", he knew he was writing nonsensical conclusions on the basis of his extremely detailed factual analyses. But, that's OK, really. What else could he say? What is so unique about Karl Marx? Well, beyond the astonishing detail of his writings, and the broad sweep of their implications, he was also a total failure and an outsider, which makes him rather unusual for an economist. Economists are generally team players, part of the social system, supporters of the status quo, or, in any case, only slight variations on it. Karl Marx was none of these. Marx was an outsider, an intellectual rebel, who clothed his rebellion in the guise of highly detailed scholarly analyses of economic theory. Indeed, I think it could be rather easily argued that Marx was deliberately choosing a conventionally socially conformist field, economics, in which to frame his social rebellion, to give it somewhat greater impact and appeal. So, he chose that ultimate philosophical social conformist -- Georg Whilhelm Friedrich Hegel -- as the role model for his philosophical and social analyses, basically turning Hegel's concept of dialectics on its head. Hegel's intention was to discredit Immanuel Kant's materialistic empirical conception of reality by showing how ideas alone could be used to understand reality, thus reinforcing idealistic social control through institutions like the Christian Church. Marx decided to tie Hegel's dialectical method to material reality, as the only true reality, thus systematically attacking all conventional idealistic social structures like Christianity, Government and religion in general -- thus, "religion is the opiate of the masses". If we want to really understand what Karl Marx was about, and what makes him so very special, I think it would probably be best to compare him to someone he was really rather like -- Diogenes the Cynic, the guy who lived in a barrel in ancient Athens during the time of Alexander the Great, and walked around with a lamp in broad daylight "trying to find an honest man". Marx was an iconoclast, a cynic, a man who was attacking everyone and everything, clothing it all in the most erudite academic guise, really, as a kind of broad joke on the system, by attacking it from within, using its very own language and control structures. #marx #karlmarx #communism #economics #philosophy #metaphysics #history #philosophyofhistory #diogenes #hegel #historyofphilosophy #engels #capitalism #daskapital #cynicism #dialectics #dialecticalmaterialism #christianity #religion