Philosopher · Modern
Karl Marx
1818–1883 · Historical materialism
Baptized Lutheran at six for his father's convenience; a militant atheist from his student years.
Marx turned Hegel's dialectic into a materialist theory of history driven by class struggle and the mode of production, analyzed capitalism as the extraction of surplus value and the alienation of labor, and called for the proletariat to abolish private property in the means of production. Religion he called “the opium of the people,” a consolation that must vanish with the conditions that need it.
Why he matters: Rerum Novarum (1891) was written in his shadow, Quadragesimo Anno 117–120 and Divini Redemptoris (1937) judged his system, the CDF instructions of 1984 and 1986 measured liberation theology against it, and Centesimus Annus (1991) surveyed its collapse; no Catholic social thought is intelligible without him.
Where to be careful
Communism is “intrinsically perverse” (Divini Redemptoris 58) and “no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist” (Quadragesimo Anno 120); his atheism, materialism, collectivism, abolition of property and subordination of morality to class are each contrary to the faith and to the natural law.
Reading
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The Communist ManifestoKarl Marx and Friedrich Engels · The source, short and vivid.
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Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844Karl Marx · Alienation; the “humanist” Marx that liberation theology favored.
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Divini RedemptorisPope Pius XI, 1937 · The Church's definitive judgment on atheistic communism.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.