Marx

Hegel said that the “I” develops itself in the form of history; Karl Heinrich Marx (Trier, Germany 1818 – London 1883) criticized Hegel by saying that it is not the “I” that makes history; things are exactly the opposite: it is the economic structure, that is the course of history and economy, that confers on the ego its ideological superstructure, that is, its mental features, its conscience. This reversal operated by Marx is the “historical materialism”. According to this thought, it is necessary to study not how the “I” is made or works, but how history, material things, are made and work, since they are the ones that form the “I”; the dialectic of Hegel’s “I” must be transformed into “dialectical materialism”. History is dialectical history of opposition of the social classes, which at the time of Marx were identified as bourgeoisie, equivalent to capitalists, that is, the owners of the means of production and the capital, as opposed to the proletariat (literally: those who have only the offspring, that is their children, as their only wealth), who are the propertyless, who can only sell theoir workforce as their sole resource. The worker poses, alienates his life in the object he produces; the capitalist takes possession of it, paying this work less than it is worth, and this way takes possession of the life of the worker. In fact the worker, in six hours, produces with his labor force a value sufficient to make him live, equivalent to the pay he receives; in the remaining hours of work he produces a plus-value, that is an added value, which actually is not paid to him. Another way in which unpaid surplus value is formed is when several workers work in collaboration, because this way they produce more than they would produce by working on their own, and yet the pay they receive continues to be like the one they would receive for working individually; moreover, the advantage of using machineries can be added to this. All this produces an ever-increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of an increasingly restricted number of people, opposed to an increasingly numerous and poor mass of proletarians, until the mechanism no longer holds up, proletarians inevitably become aware of themselves and make the revolution to take possession of the means of production. The marxist phrase “Proletarians of the whole world, unite!” has become famous. This way a society without private property, without social classes, without division of labor, without alienation, without a State, is destined to form. It is the communist society, as opposed to the previous capitalist society. These political theories would have to materialize later in the intentions of communist Russia and China, whose political and economic history has shown the difference from how things go in reality. One of the limits of Marxist theory is the fact of limiting the value of objects to the amount of work that was necessary to achieve them, thus neglecting other factors, such as the influence of market laws, the relationship between supply and demand, etc.
Religion was defined by Marx, with an expression that became famous as well, “opium of the peoples”; in it man finds himself distracted from the concrete political struggle and instead invents an imaginary world, in which to project his desires, his frustrations, a world in which to see resolved the conflicts and the contradictions that afflict him in the real world; to combat this projection, alienation, we must fight not it directly, but the historical conditions that determined it.