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There are endless interpretations of the "philosophy of Marx", from the interior of the Marxist movement as well as in its exterior. Although some have separated Marx's works between a "[[young Marx]]" (in particular the ''[[Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844]]'') and a "mature Marx" or also by separating it into purely philosophical works, economics works and political and historical interventions, Étienne Balibar has pointed out that Marx's works can be divided into "economic works" (''[[Das Kapital]]'', 1867), "philosophical works" and "historical works" (''[[The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte]]'', the 1871 ''[[The Civil War in France|Civil War in France]]'' which concerned the [[Paris Commune]] and acclaimed it as the first "[[dictatorship of the proletariat]]", etc.)<ref name="balibar" />
Marx's philosophy is thus inextricably linked to his [[critique of political economy]] and to his historical interventions in the [[workers' movement]], such as the 1875 ''[[Critique of the Gotha Program]]'' or ''[[The Communist Manifesto]]'', written with Engels (who was observing the [[Chartist movement]]) a year before the [[Revolutions of 1848]]. Both after the defeat of the French socialist movement during [[French coup of 1851|Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's 1851 coup]] and then after the crushing of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx's thought transformed itself.{{cn|date=September 2024}}
Marxism's philosophical roots were thus commonly explained as derived from three
On the other hand, [[Costanzo Preve]] (1990) has assigned four "masters" to Marx: [[Epicurus]] (to whom he dedicated his thesis, ''Difference of natural philosophy between [[Democritus]] and Epicurus'', 1841) for his materialism and theory of [[clinamen]] which opened up a realm of [[liberty]]; [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]], from which come his idea of [[egalitarian]] [[democracy]]; [[Adam Smith]], from whom came the idea that the grounds of [[property]] is [[Manual labour|labour]]; and finally [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]].
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=== Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ===
{{See also|Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel}}
Marx developed a comprehensive, theoretical understanding of political reality early in his intellectual and activist career by means of a critical adoption and radicalization of the categories of 18th and 19th century German Idealist thought. Of particular importance is Hegel's appropriation of Aristotle's organicist and essentialist categories in the light of Kant's transcendental turn.{{cn|date=September 2024}}
Marx builds on four contributions Hegel makes to our philosophical understanding. They are: (1) the replacement of mechanism and atomism with Aristotelean categories of organicism and essentialism, (2) the idea that world history progresses through stages, (3) the difference between natural and historical (dialectical) change, and (4) the idea that dialectical change proceeds through contradictions in the thing itself.{{cn|date=September 2024}}
'''(1) Aristotelian organicism and essentialism'''
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=== Rupture with German idealism and the Young Hegelians ===
{{Main|German idealism|Young Hegelians}}
Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, [[Bruno Bauer]], a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Having achieved his thesis on the ''Difference of natural philosophy between [[Democritus]] and [[Epicurus]]'' in 1841, the young Marx progressively broke away with the [[Prussia]]n [[university]] and its teachings impregnated by German Idealism ([[Immanuel Kant|Kant]], [[Fichte]], [[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling|Schelling]] and Hegel).{{cn|date=September 2024}}
Along with Engels, who observed the [[Chartism|Chartist]] movement in the [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland|United Kingdom]], he cut away with the environment in which he grew up and encountered the [[proletariat]] in France and Germany. He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, ''[[The Holy Family (book)|The Holy Family]]'' (1845), and ''The German Ideology'' (1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also [[Max Stirner]]'s ''[[The Ego and Its Own]]'' (1844), considered one of the founding book of [[individualist anarchism]]. Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently [[Marx's theory of alienation|alienating]], and that replacing God with Humanity, as did [[Ludwig Feuerbach]] in ''[[The Essence of Christianity]]'' (1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the [[nationalism|Nation]], or even the [[Revolution]] alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized [[Proudhon]], who had become famous with his cry "[[Property is theft!]]", in ''[[The Poverty of Philosophy]]'' (1845).{{cn|date=September 2024}}
Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx,
But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had pointed out, and explained that the alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he [[Marx's theory of human nature|criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature]] in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of [[religion]] into the essence of man (''menschliche Wesen'', human nature). But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations."
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A year before the [[Revolutions of 1848]], Marx and Engels thus wrote ''The Communist Manifesto'', which was prepared to an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: "[[Workers of the world, unite!|Proletarians of all countries, unite!]]". However, Marx's thought changed again following [[Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte]]'s [[French coup of December 1851|December 2, 1851 coup]], which put an end to the [[French Second Republic]] and created the [[French Second Empire|Second Empire]] which would last until the 1870 [[Franco-Prussian War]].
Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in the ''Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844'' and would later arrive to his theory of [[commodity fetishism]], exposed in the first chapter of the first book of ''Das Kapital'' (1867). This abandonment of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed, and several Marxist theorists, including [[Marxist humanist]]s such as the [[Praxis School]], would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the "[[Louis Althusser#The 'Epistemological Break'|epistemological break]]" between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society.{{cn|date=September 2024}}
In 1844–1845, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed, in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "[[Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844]]", a text that most explicitly elaborated his [[Marx's theory of alienation|theory of alienation]]), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of [[political economy]].
He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper ''[[Rheinische Zeitung]]'' on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary [[commons|right of collecting wood]] in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy.{{cn|date=September 2024}}
==== Historical materialism ====
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<blockquote>In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [[relations of production]] appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material [[forces of production]]. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The [[mode of production]] of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.</blockquote>
In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social [[base and superstructure|superstructure]]. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from [[feudalism]], and by the prediction of the development of socialism from [[capitalism]].{{cn|date=September 2024}}
The base-superstructure and [[stadial history|stadialist]] formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, in particular in [[dialectical materialism]] (''diamat'', as it was [[philosophy in the Soviet Union|known in the Soviet Union]]). They also gave way to a vulgar Marxism as plain [[economic determinism]] (or [[economism]]), which has been criticized by various [[Marxist theorists]]. "Vulgar Marxism" was seen as little other than a variety of [[economic determinism]], with the alleged determination of the [[ideology|ideological]] [[base and superstructure|superstructure]] by the economical [[infrastructure]]. However, this [[positivism|positivist]] reading, which mostly based itself on Engels' latter writings in an attempt to theorize "[[scientific socialism]]" (an expression coined by Engels) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci or Althusser.
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