As a graduate student Karl Marx was enthralled with the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, the most dominant German thinker of his day. Hegel is called an “Absolute Idealist.” The real world for him is a world of ideas. Reality is by no means static in Hegel’s view. It is driven by the dialectical movement of history according to the three-fold pattern of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” Each stage of history, the “thesis”, establishes itself as the norm, only to be challenged and replaced by its opposite, the “antithesis”.
The struggle between these two stages eventually gives rise to a ”synthesis” of the two. This in turn becomes the new thesis stage, and the dialectical process begins a fresh. The final end of this historical process according to Hegel will be the ideal state of both reality and the human political world. Hegel’s thought dominated western philosophy for decades and this is why Marx chose to study and follow his philosophy when building his own. Hegel’s main follower in the English-speaking world was F.H. Bradley.
Although he was strongly influenced by Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, Marx chose, in his own words, to “stand it on its head”. That is to say, rather than affirming ideal reality as the proper way to construe one’s understanding of the world, Marx maintained that it is material reality that determines the nature of things. Thus, his philosophy is referred to as “dialectical materialism.” In his works Marx traced the development of history and society according to a dialectical pattern, the stages of which followed the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” pattern.
In short, then, Marx’s philosophy was materialistic at the base, but he was not a “physicalist” in the narrow sense of the term. He sought to track the major dynamics of human history and culture through their dialectical stages according to the thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern, each stage arising out of its conflict with the previous stage. He saw them as moving from the primitive communal epoch through that of slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and finally concluding with the socialist/communist stage. The major dynamic driving this progression according to Marx is “class conflict.”
Thus, according to Marx in each of the above stages the “haves” and the “have-nots” struggle to control the basic “means of production” so as to improve their respective quality of life. The temporary resolution of each of these struggles, Marx argued, triggers the arrival of the next. This dialectical process follows an inexorable law and will eventually lead to the fulfillment of human history and humankind. So in the end Marx was a humanist and looked forward to the emancipation of the human. He collaborated with Friedrich Engels a great deal in producing his many volumes.
This makes the material world the base upon which the human world will build. Marx generally termed these respectively the “substructure” and the “superstructure” of both reality and the dialectical process driving it. The key factor in all of these stages and processes is the control of the means of production. In modern times this has resulted in the struggle between the owners of “capitalist” class and the “proletariat” of the working class. Thus, in the 20th century we have followed the conflict between socialist countries like Russia and China, on the one hand, and capitalist America, on the other.
In spite of the terms involved in the designation “dialectical materialism”, it is clear that Marx was not a philosophical materialist. What he cared most about was the wellbeing of human beings, their possibility for opportunity and growth. Unfortunately, most of those who claimed to have followed in his path have managed to twist his philosophy into a mere caricature of his main ideas. This partly explains his basic withdrawal from active political involvement during the last thirty years of his life while working in the British Museum writing his many books. Essentially Marx was a thinker, not an activist.