by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: January 17, 2009   Last Updated: May 25, 2009

Marx believed, like Hobbes and Hegel that absolute state power was de rigeur. Marx made a religion of historical determinism and material evolution in such a way that the highest good and ultimate end was to produce a global commune of happy people. Marx was the first working class economist, as classical economists support the upper classes and concetrated wealth with capital. Each school is presently equally wrong in interpretation of the intentions of Adam Smith who intended capitalism to be a tool for a governing power in production and distribution of materials rather than as a political philosophy.

Karl Marx's adaptation of Hegel's political philosophy to suit his political needs was an interesting intellectual act. The need for political reform in Europe was obvious as so many people had been historically repressed and exploited circumstantially. The ruling elites were comfortable though not as much perhaps as today's middle class. The nations of Europe had a mixed bag of government forms from monarchy to autocracy with parliamentary democracy thrown in. The industrial revolution was in full blaze in England and Germany was close behind. The people of the rural areas had been increasingly forced off the land in England and moved in to London and other industrial locations. It was an era before environmental protection laws and life was very bad for many-what was a well educated philosopher with starving children to do?

Karl Marx spent much of his life working as a professional communist writer receiving grants from various people, working in libraries and getting some financial help from his friend Engels. Marx took his German, Hegelian philosophical training and put it to political use finding a very lofty basis to create his formalized philosophy of Marxism upon. It is dubious that socialist practices needed or benefitted by the use of the Hegelian philosophy of dialectical evolution of the spirit in all things including material from a purely material basis. It was a sort of statue of liberty hand off for Marx from Hegel without Hegel's acquiescence that seemed natural enough. Let a material evolution from some unknown origin actualize in history at the high level of consciousness and business with a thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis. This philosophical basis for the evolution of forms of social organization and government is without merit, yet it did apply the fashionable philosophy of Hegel to the popular problem of finding a credible basis for

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